Re: [groff] RFC: replace doc/webpage.ms or "evergreen" it

[Dave Kemper]

On 11/8/18, G. Branden Robinson <address@hidden> wrote:
> doc/webpage.ms is a nice example of how to do some fairly sophisticated
> stuff with groff, putting groff color extensions and the www macro
> package on top of the classical ms macro package to make an attractive
> hypertext document.
>
> ...but it is a maintenance burden to keep up.  It appears to be the
> source document for the groff home page at some time in the past.

What's its present role?  If the content's only current value is
illustrating some good -ms techniques, then yeah, those techniques
should probably be in an example file that explains them as it
illustrates them, rather than merely illustrating them as a side
effect of explaining something else.  But, as it would be a complete
rewrite, this solution is also the most work.

I noticed in my own recent trawl through the documentation that
webpage.ms shares much of its text with the README file, which seems
both wrongheaded -- instead of all that text being duplicated, it
should live in one place, with files that need it being generated from
this source -- and impossible to solve: there's no way to
machine-generate good .ms code from plain text, and while going the
other way is technically feasible, it's nonsensical for a source-tree
README to only exist after a build.