Re: an opinionated history of *roff macro packages (was: pdfroff in groff 1.23.0.rc3 changes compared to 1.22.4)

[Damian McGuckin]

Branden,

On Thu, 6 Apr 2023, G. Branden Robinson wrote:

> At 2023-04-05T18:13:16+0000, Micha? Kruszewski wrote:
> > I have once evaluated ms, mm and mom.  I have come from the Latex
> > world after being sick of its bloat.  I was looking for something
> > simple.  I know some differences between ms, mm and mom, but I do not
> > really understand why people did not want to cooperate to create a
> > single macro package and single program.
>
> The reasons are mostly historical and organizational.  Adding "me", 
> "man", and mdoc to the above list, I'll offer a summary.  Some of this 
> is grounded on my absorption of historical documents and some is 
> reckless speculation with a conspiratorial bent.  I am a first-hand 
> observer of practically nothing discussed here.

> ms, written by Mike Lesk, came first, in Version 6 Unix (1975).

....

> mm(7) also shares many macros in common with ms(7), and in many ways 
> matches ms(7)'s behavior more closely than man(7) does.  But it also has 
> a _lot_ more macros.  Also, both ms(7) and mm(7) come from AT&T.  So why 
> do we have both?

Doug is a first-hand ms(7) user and has been since it started in 1975 I 
believe so he might be able to fill in some of the blanks.

I think the original reasons for having both packages far predates the 
1980 time slot about which you speak.

Again, I think Doug's memory is better placed to fill in the gaps on ms(7) 
and mm(7), not least because he was a lot closer to what happened and has 
been using ms(7) for much longer than I have used mm(7).

There is a paper on MM published at an October 1976 conference by Mashey 
and Smith. When I asked John Mashey for some background on this during 
COVID, he most kindly replied with some history and precisely mentioned 
why MM was created:

        Mike?s -MS was already out, but didn?t cover the various document
        formats in our Area at BTL Piscataway. Dale (Smith) & I had written
        several different local packages, then it was time to do a general
        one with parameterization to cover them all, hence the ?style
        sheet? approach that let the bulk of the text take on different
        appearances. I think the 1st version of MM was 4Q75 or 1Q76, it
        was certainly in wide use at BTL Piscataway by 2Q/3Q76, or we
        wouldn?t have talked about it in October 1976 conference.

        MM was apparently the most stressful macro package, as we often
        found nroff bugs no one else did. Joe Ossanna was thankfully very
        quick at fixing them.

At UNSW in Civil Engineering, we had our own reasons for adopting MM (with 
nroff and troff) in the late 70s for use by academic staff and secretaries 
(who manipulated documents and technical papers with ed(1)) but that is 
probably not relevant to this conversation.

- Damian