11–20 of 67 posts
Because the troff format was designed with the limitations on early 70's computers in mind and seem to be used exclusively for man pages. Why not upgrade to something that better correspond to how we actually code now (ie markdown)?
I'm going to be frank: why? I've recently looked into making my own manpage and it's a pretty old looking system. The docs are not really clear but using some examples and trial and error I got there. My point is though, why does it need a maintainer? The system feels old enough to get deprecated instead of keeping it alive, let alone bring out new releases. I haven't spent more than a day working with groff though,…
Well... manpages are still very much alive and widely used, and they're so prevalent that moving to something new is a nearly ridiculous requirement. Half the things with manpages in the wild are probably themselves not maintained. Now you have two problems. We can move to something new, but getting everyone to agree on what that is, then implementing and maintaining it... isn't that more work than just maintaining t…
As a consumer you wouldn't need to care about the format behind the scene and the format is already well known by programmers, there are plenty of libraries that solve can read markdown and plenty of people who know it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well... manpages are still very much alive and widely used, and they're so prevalent that moving to something new is a nearly ridiculous requirement. Half the things with manpages in the wild are probably themselves not maintained. Now you have two problems. We can move to something new, but getting everyone to agree on what that is, then implementing and maintaining it... isn't that more work than just maintaining t…
Why not format manpages as markdown? As a consumer you wouldn't need to care about the format behind the scene and the format is already well known by programmers, there are plenty of libraries that solve can read markdown and plenty of people who know it.
I only see this working if some big entity slams the gavel and decrees this as the new manpage standard, but I also don't see any such entity having much incentive to do so.
Does it currently have any important bugs? Because the troff format was designed with the limitations on early 70's computers in mind and seem to be used exclusively for man pages. Why not upgrade to something that better correspond to how we actually code now (ie markdown)?
Remember that the worst bugs in the last couple of years have been in the code that nobody was looking at.
Does it currently have any important bugs? Because the troff format was designed with the limitations on early 70's computers in mind and seem to be used exclusively for man pages. Why not upgrade to something that better correspond to how we actually code now (ie markdown)?
If nobody is maintaining it, how can you tell it doesn't currently have any important bugs? Remember that the worst bugs in the last couple of years have been in the code that nobody was looking at.
[1] http://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article&sid=20110314142734
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why not format manpages as markdown? As a consumer you wouldn't need to care about the format behind the scene and the format is already well known by programmers, there are plenty of libraries that solve can read markdown and plenty of people who know it.
I agree that might be a good choice for a more modern alternative, but it still doesn't solve the problem of existing manpages. You could cleverly upconvert on the fly of course, but that's basically the same thing as keeping groff around, except with the added friction of informing everyone that they should be using Markdown now, with new tooling and conventions. Don't underestimate the marketing costs of successful…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why not format manpages as markdown? As a consumer you wouldn't need to care about the format behind the scene and the format is already well known by programmers, there are plenty of libraries that solve can read markdown and plenty of people who know it.
I agree that might be a good choice for a more modern alternative, but it still doesn't solve the problem of existing manpages. You could cleverly upconvert on the fly of course, but that's basically the same thing as keeping groff around, except with the added friction of informing everyone that they should be using Markdown now, with new tooling and conventions. Don't underestimate the marketing costs of successful…
In which the fundamental problem with not paying for your open source software is revealed.