GNU Groff (which is probably doing the behind-the-scenes formatting work when you use man pages on GNU/Linux) currently has no maintainer, and the most recent stable release was in 2013. Who would like to step up and help?
Tell HN: Groff needs your help
1–10 of 67 posts
Re: Tell HN: Groff needs your help
#2In which the fundamental problem with not paying for your open source software is revealed.
Re: Tell HN: Groff needs your help
#3In which the fundamental problem with not paying for your open source software is revealed.
This is a fundamental problem with open source software.
Re: Tell HN: Groff needs your help
#4The Groff Mission Statement looks interesting.
http://www.gnu.org/software/groff/groff-mission-statement.ht...
Re: Tell HN: Groff needs your help
#5GNU Groff is terrible and the only reason it hasn't been replaced with a superior implementation is that all the better versions are politically incompatible with GNU. It's no surprise they're having a hard time finding someone interested in effectively code-laundering and slapping a GPL on it.
Re: Tell HN: Groff needs your help
#6In which the fundamental problem with not paying for your open source software is revealed.
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 installations.
Re: Tell HN: Groff needs your help
#7The Groff Mission Statement looks interesting. http://www.gnu.org/software/groff/groff-mission-statement.ht...
The question is - do we really need the typesetting part? I had a troff phase (bought some books) ten years ago. But the community of users is small, its capabilities are eclipsed by TeX, and the language is quite arcane.
One could even go a step further and argue that writing man pages would be much easier (and presumably more man pages would be written) if the markup language was switched to e.g. Markdown by default. For my own software, I am already using Pandoc to generate nroff input from Markdown.
Re: Tell HN: Groff needs your help
#8it doesn't look abandoned: http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/groff.git
Re: Tell HN: Groff needs your help
#9I'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, perhaps many people still use it (every website with info just looked about as old as your average man page), so I may be completely missing the point here. If so, tell me!
Re: Tell HN: Groff needs your help
#10I'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 the working solution everyone already agrees on, and that solves the problem?