[bug #64772] [hdtbl] consider deprecating

[Dave]

Follow-up Comment #5, bug #64772 (project groff):

Some history:

The author of the HDtbl macros, Joachim Walsdorff, presented them to the email
list in http://lists.gnu.org/r/groff/2005-12/msg00003.html (at a now-defunct
URL).  The package was first bundled with groff in groff 1.20 (announced at
http://lists.gnu.org/r/groff/2009-01/msg00011.html).

Larry Kollar was an early user and submitted an extensive patch
(http://lists.gnu.org/r/groff/2010-01/msg00052.html) partially applied as
[http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/groff.git/commit/?id=2c77a4a8 commit
2c77a4a8].

The last groff post I can find from Dr. Walsdorff was in 2014
(http://lists.gnu.org/r/groff/2014-03/msg00214.html).  His savannah profile
(http://savannah.gnu.org/users/x01) shows no activity.

In a 2020 thread on the list, Ingo Schwarze gave a more complete overview of
the package's current status
(http://lists.gnu.org/r/groff/2020-01/msg00060.html) than the various offhand
comments from bug reports quoted here.  This was in response to someone asking
about it, so some user interest in it remains.  Notably, part of Ingo's report
says, "i recently had to look at parts of the code... the code quality is
absolutely terrible.  I have little doubt that it is full of bugs and
instabilities," which implies his previously quoted characterization of the
package as "buggy as hell" is speculative based on code inspection, rather
than empirical based on testing.


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