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Re: [Groff] surprise, surprise
From: |
Werner LEMBERG |
Subject: |
Re: [Groff] surprise, surprise |
Date: |
Tue, 04 Sep 2001 08:35:35 +0200 (CEST) |
> > PS. Who're you calling young?
>
> Well, I dare not intervene on that last point.
Aah, I've missed this post scriptum! With `young' I consider all
groff users who have never used AT&T troff or an equal commercial
variant.
> So maybe there should be two programs: GNU troff, and groff. GNU
> troff would be the GNU implementation of UNIX troff, and could be
> used without soul-searching by people who still have old troff
> files which need formatting.
At least *I* won't implement such a thing. As far as I can see, the
implementation differences between troff and groff (using -C) are
marginal in most cases and affect highly obscure features no user
should really rely on.
> 3. And now for the question. In the above mentioned "man troff"
> section on Incompatibilities, only the first paragraph explicitly
> states what the effect of "-C" is, namely to disallow long names
> (and enable interpretation of ".abcde" as ".ab cde"; and this is
> all that is stated under ".cp" as well).
As mentioned in a previous mail, the other main thing is the
preservation of the input level -- I'll add this soon to the docs.
> For all the other incompatibilities listed under
> "Incompatibilities", (".ps 10u", differences between unformatted
> input characters and formatted output characters, etc) it is not
> explicitly stated whether these are still incompatibilities in
> compatibility mode.
They are still incompatibilities.
> So: Are there incompatibilities between "groff -C" and "UNIX
> troff" and, if so, which are they? I have had so very little need
> to use groff in "compatibility" mode that I have never done the
> experimentation needed to establish any of this.
Everything mentioned in the `Incompatibilities' section falls into
this category. Clark seems to have made a clear distinction between
syntactical issues (controlled by -C) on the input level, extentions
to the syntax, and typographical output. The latter two can't be
switched off in compatibility mode.
> By the way: Plan-9 troff source presumably compiles to a truly
> compatible "UNIX troff"; at any rate the "Troff Users Manual" that
> goes with Plan-9 troff seems to be almost identical to the UNIX one.
> But I suppose that the Plan-9 "licence" is incompatible with GNU's
> GPL.
Since Plan-9's troff is freely available, the easiest solution is to
make it compile on platforms like Linux -- since the Plan-9 extensions
are surrounded by #ifdef statements, this shouldn't be too hard. I
can imagine that providing an RPM or Debian package (with an
appropriate diff file) would be the right thing.
I must admit that I really don't care whether this `original troff' is
GPL'ed or not...
Werner