Re: [groff] 15/39: [grog]: Drop relic code and comments.

[Dave Kemper]

On 10/30/22, G. Branden Robinson <g.branden.robinson@gmail.com> wrote:
> They'll be told at configure time, because we have an Autoconf test for
> it.

Reasonable.

> Furthermore, I've rewritten grog nearly completely since Bernd last
> touched it.  I don't have any idea what Perl 5.6(.1) features Bernd had
> in mind when he added that statement.

Also reasonable.  I knew grog had been largely rewritten, but didn't
scrutinize the history closely enough to realize that line was an
artifact from its old life.

> Perl 5.6.1 is incredibly old (April 2001).  I
> cannot find any evidence of any current distribution supporting it.

I'm less convinced by this -- unless a difficult roadblock stands in
the way, I think modern groff ought to work or fail gracefully on an
obsolete platform -- but the prior two points are convincing enough on
their own.

> I'd prefer to audit the script as you describe than to restore this
> arcane feature to it; I had to find out about it the hard way.

Makes sense.  I thought this audit might be onerous, but your patch in
the followup email doesn't change many lines (and followed pretty
quickly on the heels of this email).  It looks good to me!