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Old 18th October 2010
backrow backrow is offline
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Default OpenBSD −= groff

schwarze@ has been making some strides in removing groff(1) from the OpenBSD tree, and it is likely to be cut out this week. The ports tree is ready for the switch.

Mandoc has been compiling most OpenBSD base system manpages for a few months now. It provides several advantages over groff:
  • It’s small
  • It’s fast
  • It’s BSD‐licensed
  • It’s written in C (I hear groff is the only C++ code in the OpenBSD tree—removing it will improve the situation for PCC as well)

What’s more, this will make things better for actual roff users. groff will be moving to the ports tree, and it’ll be a newer version—1.20, instead of the ancient 1.15 currently in base (that has some irritating formatting quirks).

Other BSDs are on track to move to mandoc as well. Kristaps Dzonsons has certainly done a great service by providing us with this software.
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Old 19th October 2010
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Done
http://marc.info/?l=openbsd-ports&m=128742758603034&w=2
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Old 19th October 2010
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I made a small/minimal FreeBSD LiveUSB/CD build script a few months ago*, among other things I stripped large packages and replaced them with smaller packages which did the same thing, among other things I replaced groff and related stuff with mdoc and that worked surprisingly well.

* Well, I never finished it, you know how these things go: The last 10% is 90% of the effort
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Old 20th October 2010
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This is joyous news! Groff represents both a sizible and important bit of work, I respect that. Certainly beats having to use info foo all day...but it is really nice to see an alternative to that tub of lard.

Last time I looked through FreeBSDs source tree for such things, groff amounted to the vast majority of C++ code to be found. I would still want to use groff for working with troff documents outside the man/mdoc family, but the most exposure anyone gets to *roff these days is man foo; everyone else can't complain too much if the need an extra package for more than that, can they? :-)

If this someday speeds up the buildworld times on FreeBSD, as well as making OpenBSD even leaner & meaner, I will be one happy spider :-D
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Old 20th October 2010
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Quote:
Originally Posted by TerryP View Post

If this someday speeds up the buildworld times on FreeBSD, as well as making OpenBSD even leaner & meaner, I will be one happy spider :-D
Well the major issue with Groff is that is written in C++. Not having C++ code in the base is the last ingredient needed for removing GCC compiler from the base of OpenBSD (last remaining parts of the GPL code are GCC compiler and binutils). Yes, you are right about the size. Removing Groff and eventually GCC will reduce the OpenBSD default installation for about 100MB. Now replacing GCC with PCC (eventually) will have as a byproduct 10 times shorter buildworld times. It will also have as a consequence much faster binaries (binaries produced with PCC are many times faster than the one produced by GCC).

Finally moving Groff to ports will finally allow the updated to version 1.20 for serious Groff users.
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Old 20th October 2010
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Oko View Post
replacing GCC with PCC (eventually) will have as a byproduct 10 times shorter buildworld times. It will also have as a consequence much faster binaries (binaries produced with PCC are many times faster than the one produced by GCC).
I've been looking forward to PCC for licensing reasons (and a general dislike of GCC), but I didn't realize PCC produced faster binaries faster than GCC could...that's welcome news indeed. Do you have a link to benchmarks or is this personal experience?
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Old 20th October 2010
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Quote:
Originally Posted by rocket357 View Post
I've been looking forward to PCC for licensing reasons (and a general dislike of GCC), but I didn't realize PCC produced faster binaries faster than GCC could...that's welcome news indeed. Do you have a link to benchmarks or is this personal experience?
http://pcc.ludd.ltu.se/

Bare in mind that PCC is still its infancy (I mean after recent rebirth). The work on optimization has not even started but even with the default options it produces faster binaries than GCC. Now I do not know about the progress of AerieBSD guys on binutils but that is really the last peace of the tool chain which is GNU provided.
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Old 20th October 2010
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Oko View Post
So I went through the whole site and couldn't find the benchmarking section. Could you link it?
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Old 20th October 2010
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I'm not aware of any benchmarks comparing GCC and PCC, but PCC does seem to compile 90% of the stuff I've thrown at it considerably faster.. the speed of the resulting executables is hard to compare accurately.

PCC as a compiler is smaller and arguably easier to understand (..source wise) than GCC, which is great considering it is also compatible with the compiler.
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Old 21st October 2010
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Quote:
Originally Posted by BSDfan666 View Post
PCC as a compiler is smaller and arguably easier to understand (..source wise) than GCC
I'd have to agree with you here...a simple comparison of GCC-core 4.5.1 and PCC cvs-101021 (both downloaded just moments ago):

GCC:
142 MB, uncompressed
1391 C source files
911 C header files

PCC:
7.3 MB, uncompressed
97 C source files
40 C header files
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