Re: Latest hdtbl.tmac

[Ingo Schwarze]

Hi Yves,

Hi Ralph Corderoy wrote on Tue, Jan 28, 2020 at 11:51:38AM +0000:
> Yves Cloutier wrote:

>> Where would one find the latest version of hdtbl.tmac?

> I don't know if its author, Joachim Walsdorff, has a later version than
> groff's.
 
>> Is it already packaged as part of the groff distribution?

> Yes, http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/groff.git/tree/contrib/hdtbl

That's all completely correct.

However, you should be aware that hdtbl is abandonware of extremely
low quality.  I know because i recently had to look at parts of the
code to fix some portability issues.  It turned out the code quality
is absolutely terrible.  I have little doubt that it is full of
bugs and instabilities, and it certainly needs huge amounts of code
cleanup.

A brief look at the changelog that Ralph cited above,

  http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/groff.git/log/contrib/hdtbl

may give you a misleading impression: there are lots of commits,
even recently, but almost all of them touch the build system and
the documentation only.

Basically, the last substantial maintenance work on hdtbl was done
by Werner Lemberg exactly ten years ago.  Since then, it's almost
completely unmaintained even though it is in dire need of maintainance.

I strongly advise against using it in production.  It's basically
an abandoned quickhack rather than software that can be taken
seriously, and it is likely to cause you grief in the long term.

Yours,
  Ingo