Tell HN: Groff needs your help

Post by pfortuny » Sun, Feb 22, 2015, 6:08 PM UTC

tomjen3 wrote: post #19

immita wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

But existing pages would be served with the already existing groff, right? Software doesn't rot, so the existing software will continue to work in the future.

Post by tedunangst » Sun, Feb 22, 2015, 6:12 PM UTC

tomjen3 wrote: post #12

immita wrote: post #10

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.

Post by hanaganics » Sun, Feb 22, 2015, 6:42 PM UTC

zokier wrote: post #24

I think the obsession with "being maintained" is somewhat unhealthy phenomenon in the FOSS world. If the code works and does what you want then why would it need constant fiddling and consistent stream of releases?

Post by lollipop331 » Sun, Feb 22, 2015, 7:58 PM UTC

immita wrote: post #6

gress wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a fundamental problem with open source software.

I'd limit it to FOSS that people don't pay for (directly or indirectly). When money is changing hands with the expectation that software is maintained in good working order, you won't see abandonment like this. But when nobody is paying or getting paid, maintenance stops, regardless of whether the software is a key component of crypto on the internet or a fundamental part of the documentation of most Linux installati…

Post by tedunangst » Sun, Feb 22, 2015, 8:09 PM UTC

rakoo wrote: post #26

tedunangst wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

markdown isn't semantic. roff macros allow one to clearly specify that function arguments (Fa) and command line flags (Fl) are different things, even if they render similarly.

Is this really needed in a manpage, though ? AFAIK manpages are ASCII document created with any variation of troff/nroff/groff and piped into less -s. There is no need for any semantical distinction if display is the same, since the best interaction you can have is searching for something.