Re: [groff] groff as the basis for comprehensive documentation?

[G. Branden Robinson]

At 2018-04-17T00:05:59+1000, John Gardner wrote:
> I'm referring to a select choice of words that just happens to neatly fall
> against the 72-character limit... =) Here's the commit message I was
> referring to:
> 
> Like man(7), mdoc(7) is a macro package for marking up computer manuals.
> The main difference is that mdoc is semantic rather than presentational,
> providing authors with a full DSL to abstract page markup from low-level
> Roff commands. By contrast, `man` is minimalist and leaves formatting to
> the author, who is expected to have a working amount of Roff knowledge.
> 
> Therefore the use of `mdoc` for marking up Node's manpage is a decidedly
> better choice than bare `man`. Less room is left for error and mandoc(1)
> offers very robust error-checking and linting.
> 
> I've been writing every commit-message like this for years and I got too
> good at it, now I look completely mental... :-\

Years ago, we Debian people noticed that our comrade Joey Hess bore a
talent for doing this in ordinary email list traffic.  Hasty research
was done and evidently the term for this is "bricktext".  Some people
have a natural talent for it.  I am not one of them.  :)

-- 
Regards,
Branden

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