Re: grog Category in savannah?

[G. Branden Robinson]

[redirecting to groff@]

Hi, Dave!

I'm not certain, but I don't get the feeling bug-groff@ (or
groff-commit@) is supposed to be a discussion list.  I do think people
subscribed to groff@ should be subscribed to those as well, however.

At 2021-06-04T07:11:46-0500, Dave Kemper wrote:
> Does anyone have an opinion how "grog" bugs should be categorized in
> savannah?  Currently some are "Core" and some "Preprocessor - other,"
> neither of which is strictly accurate, though "Preprocessor" seems
> spiritually closer.  Maybe "Utilities," unless that's intended only
> for things that live under src/utils?

grog's a really weird case.  In the source tree it lives in src/roff
alongside troff (the formatter proper), groff (the front-end), and nroff
(the character-set-sniffing AT&T nroff emulator/troff wrapper).

Such placement suggests to me that the tool actually interprets some
form of the roff(7) language, or passes its input to something that
does.

grog doesn't do that, though.  (Well, it does if you tell it to --run,
but that's not its default mode of operation.)

I also don't think it's a preprocessor, because it does not produce
troff(1) input.

Our utilities fall into 4 categories:

1. font-description producing tools (addftinfo, afmtodit, hpftodit, ...)
2. refer(1)-related tools (indxbib, lkbib, lookbib)
3. Eric Raymond's implementation of W. Richard Stevens' recipes
  ({eqn,grap,pic}2graph)
4. Mike Bianchi's gdiffmk

I reckon grog fits with those better than with anything else.  I cannot
account for its placement in the source tree; as a Perl script and
before that a shell script, it shares no code with groff(1) or troff(1)
(which both link with libgroff).

I think it would make sense to move grog to src/utils.  That would pay
the huge bonus of getting out of the damned way of tab completion when
navigating into src/roff/groff.  Any ACKs or NAKs for this?

Anyway, yeah, let's call grog a "utility" in Savannah.

And thanks as always for your continuing curation of our bug list.

Regards,
Branden

signature.asc
Description: PGP signature