Re: Unsupported nroff macros on MacOS X

[Ken Hornstein]

>>  Pandoc is available in lxplus, aiadm and most RPM repositories. It's
>>  written in Haskell, which means it relies on hundreds of megabytes of
>>  library dependencies.
>
>That's certainly fair, but wouldn't it need to be used only once, after
>which the documentation could be maintained in markdown format?  I suppose
>that would require a tool to go from markdown to man, but at least it's a
>thought.

Well, to me the PRIMARY way that nmh users interact with the
documentation is via man pages, viewed with man(1).  So being able
to generate that format is crucial.  If the point of a conversion to
Markdown (or anything else) is just so my dumb ass doesn't have to learn
random troff requests ... well, that seems like overkill.  If it's so
other people don't have to learn random troff requests, that's fair ...
but if we could solve this just by switching to tbl for tables then that
seems more sensible.  My dumb ass was able to figure out how to convert
those .fc requests to tbl tables in a short amount of time so maybe that
makes the most sense.

>>I have no objection to Markdown but I'm not sure what it would gain us
>>exactly, other than maybe someone younger than 35 could edit the
>>documentation.
>
>That may be the point -- or not, I suppose, depending on one's point of
>view.  (I'm far past the point of being under 35 myself, for what that's
>worth.)

I mean, yeah, I hear you.  Same for me!  I am just wondering out loud
if any of these up-and-coming young punks are interested in editing
man pages directly.

Doug writes:
>Anway, I'm sure I'll have a few cycles that I can devote to documentation...

We welcome the help!  Really, any way anyone wants to contribute is welcome.

>Anybody else remember the NPM debacle?

Oh yes, that's was a classic one!

>> I have no objection to Markdown but I'm not sure what it would gain
>> us exactly, other than maybe someone younger than 35 could edit the
>> documentation.
>
>LOL.  OK. I suppose I should comb the archives, but how many of us are
>actually using nmh these days?  I mean, I don't REALLY want to know
>whether I'm as much of a dinosaur as I fear, but who are we maintaining
>nmh for?

It's a fair question!  I mean, why does ANYONE maintain a particular
open-source software package if they aren't getting paid for it?

For me, I figure as long as I still use nmh, I'm gonna keep on
developing it.

--Ken