View Single Post
Old 15th April 2011
thirdm thirdm is offline
Spam Deminer
 
Join Date: May 2009
Posts: 248
Default

Quote:
Originally Posted by Oko View Post
Yes there were. Groff is a general typesetting system created by accretion over the 45 or so years. It is fairly buggy and messy and not really in wide use any more (DrJ is going to kill me for this statement).
...
I used groff with .me macros for an adult ed creative writing course this year. I'm debating going over to LaTeX on the theory it should have more advanced text spacing algorithms and hyphenate less. But I probably won't have more need for word processing since this course taught me most convincingly that I can't write for dog. "It was a dark and stormy night..."

Though one thing I'll say for nroff/groff/whatever over LaTeX is it doesn't barf all this crazy output at you every time you run it.

Sorry, this is getting off topic. My point in bringing up the other reasons for mandoc was to say they might be able to remove these other files depending on C++ without undo effort, but don't have enough reason to do it right now. But I'm not sure about that. I don't understand Mesa's relation to the rest of Xorg. Looking at /usr/xenocara/README I see something that suggests perhaps the idea of Mesa as separate module and port is nonsense:

"- dist: contains the Mesa sources, shared by lib and xserver above"

Hmmm, when I look at a file at random, it doesn't look like particularly modern C++. Maybe as part of the rest of what xenocara does to calm the Xorg build (gee, it looks like the original Xorg now uses SCons which has Python as a dependency -- yuck) they could use cfront to convert it to C and distribute that in cvs parallel to the original source. pcc and cfront in base? Major points for preserving Unix heritage. Then the few OpenBSD developers who like C++ and compilers could play at modernizing cfront over the next 50 years. Or just leave cfront out. It could be used outside the main build only to get to C each new Xorg release.
Reply With Quote