Re: [groff] A typo on fsf groff wiki page, and question about releasing

[Ingo Schwarze]

Hi John,

John Gardner wrote on Tue, Jan 09, 2018 at 07:24:25PM +1100:

> I'm wondering how many people here might react if I suggested porting
> the entire Geoff codebase to JavaScript...

My comment would be that would be a terrible choice.  The Node
package manager is among the least secure package management concepts
on the planet, and the Node concept of modularization is the most
excessive example of atomization syndrome i ever heard of.  I hope
that stuff is but a fashionable hype, it certainly lacks the potential
of a sustainable technology.  But unless you complete the job, it's
cheap talk anyway.

Also, basing groff on random, heavy-weight machinery would give away
one of the main assets of groff: That it is completely stand-alone
with minimal dependencies.  By the way, rewriting it to use C++11
would also give that away.

Note that even though it's hard to maintain and certainly not
recommended for any serious use, an OpenBSD port of Node does exist.

Yours,
  Ingo