Re: Proposed: drop groffer (was: contrib/groffer/roff2.1.man)

[John Gardner]

> Does anyone object to just deleting groffer?

Terminate with extreme prejudice.

IMHO, anything that can be achieved with an alias or shell one-liner really
doesn't warrant its own executable.

On Tue, 21 Apr 2020 at 22:32, G. Branden Robinson <
address@hidden> wrote:

> Hi Ingo!
>
> At 2020-04-19T13:55:37+0200, Ingo Schwarze wrote:
> > G. Branden Robinson wrote on Sun, Apr 19, 2020 at 07:16:58AM -0400:
> > > commit 762fab3e454786cc5e666f6d6324f455470b8ea4
> [...]
> > >     roff2.1.man generates several nearly-identical pages from the
> > >     same source*.  Use register name based on the name of the
> > >     generated page, so they don't collide.
> [...]
> > >     * This seems pretty gratituitous to me; their interfaces don't
> > >     differ at all (no difference in accepted options, for example),
> > >     and each page makes reference to all the others.  I find that a
> > >     dubious choice, and would just have one page with a
> > >     comma-delimited set of topics in the "Name" section.
> >
> > Indeed, good find, that's utter stupidity.  It would be nice to have
> > that cleaned up.
> >
> > Then again, the whole contrib/groffer directory is an abomination
> > that i suggest should be deleted outright, without any replacement.
> > It's fragile wrappers on top of wrappers on top of wrappers (remember
> > that even groff itself is already a wrapper!), of ridiculous
> > complexity, that provide no additional functionality whatsoever.
> >
> > Less bloat is more.
> >
> > It is a landmark symptom of the absense of software design when,
> > instead of making the program itself small, simple, and easy to
> > use, people write a wrapper that clearly doesn't achieve simplicity
> > either, neither of the code nor of the usage.
>
> Every time I look at cleaning it up, I despair of the task.  It saps my
> energy to even contemplate it.  Plenty of Bernd's other contributions to
> groff I find interesting or valuable, but groffer, to me, just seems
> ill-conceived.
>
> It seems like a wrapper around grog(1) that got out of control.  In my
> opinion, we should, at most, be advising people how to write shell
> aliases or functions to wrap grog and target an output device of their
> preference.  Let people help themselves instead of trying to be
> everything to everyone.
>
> So, what do the folks on the list think?
>
> Does anyone object to just deleting groffer?
>
> Regards,
> Branden
>