[bug #64279] rename roff(7) to get out of mandoc's way

[G. Branden Robinson]

Update of bug #64279 (project groff):

                  Status:               Need Info => Rejected               
             Assigned to:                    None => gbranden               
             Open/Closed:                    Open => Closed                 
                 Summary: Proposal to rename roff(7) => rename roff(7) to get
out of mandoc's way

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Follow-up Comment #6:

[comment #0 original submission:]
> In the upcoming release (1.23) roff.7.man contains mainly a history of
roff.

As noted in comment #1, there are several hundred words of explanatory
material in this page that belie this characterization.

> It is still named roff, and I can see potential name clash in the case of
installing groff on BSD systems. For example, FreeBSD already provides man
page for roff(7) (it is completely different than the one provided by groff).
If the file was renamed to something like roff_history, roff_hist,
groff_history or groff_hist, there would be no name conflict.

That is true.  It may also be worth noting that groff was shipping a roff(7)
23 years ago.


commit ceade1a69a557666f707ca9a54c8e420ca97b48b
Author: Werner LEMBERG <wl@gnu.org>
Date:   Mon May 1 23:47:49 2000 +0000

[...]
    Add new man pages comptributed by Bernd Warken <bwarken@mayn.de>
    (with slight fixes by me).
[...]
    * man/roff.man: New file giving overview of roff system.
[...]


> All man pages coming with groff start with groff_ prefix,

This simply isn't true.

If I make a file listing everything groff installs, and grep it for man pages,
this is what I get.


share/man/man1/addftinfo.1
share/man/man1/afmtodit.1
share/man/man1/chem.1
share/man/man1/eqn.1
share/man/man1/eqn2graph.1
share/man/man1/gdiffmk.1
share/man/man1/glilypond.1
share/man/man1/gperl.1
share/man/man1/gpinyin.1
share/man/man1/grap2graph.1
share/man/man1/grn.1
share/man/man1/grodvi.1
share/man/man1/groff.1
share/man/man1/grog.1
share/man/man1/grohtml.1
share/man/man1/grolbp.1
share/man/man1/grolj4.1
share/man/man1/gropdf.1
share/man/man1/grops.1
share/man/man1/grotty.1
share/man/man1/gxditview.1
share/man/man1/hpftodit.1
share/man/man1/indxbib.1
share/man/man1/lkbib.1
share/man/man1/lookbib.1
share/man/man1/mmroff.1
share/man/man1/neqn.1
share/man/man1/nroff.1
share/man/man1/pdfmom.1
share/man/man1/pdfroff.1
share/man/man1/pfbtops.1
share/man/man1/pic.1
share/man/man1/pic2graph.1
share/man/man1/preconv.1
share/man/man1/refer.1
share/man/man1/soelim.1
share/man/man1/tbl.1
share/man/man1/tfmtodit.1
share/man/man1/troff.1
share/man/man1/xtotroff.1
share/man/man5/groff_font.5
share/man/man5/groff_out.5
share/man/man5/groff_tmac.5
share/man/man7/groff.7
share/man/man7/groff_char.7
share/man/man7/groff_diff.7
share/man/man7/groff_hdtbl.7
share/man/man7/groff_man.7
share/man/man7/groff_man_style.7
share/man/man7/groff_mdoc.7
share/man/man7/groff_me.7
share/man/man7/groff_mm.7
share/man/man7/groff_mmse.7
share/man/man7/groff_mom.7
share/man/man7/groff_ms.7
share/man/man7/groff_rfc1345.7
share/man/man7/groff_trace.7
share/man/man7/groff_www.7
share/man/man7/roff.7


> and there are no conflicts.

There have assuredly been conflicts not just with man page titles, but with
program names, going all the way back to groff 1.01 in about 1990, when it was
installed to systems that already had a troff.  That is why, like many other
GNU packages, groff supports a program prefix.


$ ./configure --help
[...]
Program names:
  --program-prefix=PREFIX            prepend PREFIX to installed program
names
[...]


However, since about the year 2000, this has become less of a problem, since
GNU troff had largely supplanted proprietary troffs by then (and on BSD Unix,
well before; 4.4BSD shipped groff 1.08).

> However, the roff.7.man can potentially create problem on BSD systems.

I cannot imagine that Kristaps Dzonsons was unaware of this fact when he began
mandoc(1) (then called mdocml, I think) back around 2008,
[https://manpages.bsd.lv/history.html as documented at that project's site].

In my opinion, groff's roff(7) page (1) has several years' worth of precedence
and priority; (2) has a more synoptical view of *roff systems, even the
historical proprietary ones, than mandoc_roff(7)'s narrow focus on language
features it (selectively) supports, and thus more appropriately bears the
name; and, for those interesting in combining groff and mandoc installations,
(3) users generally have recourse to packaging systems like Debian's (which is
widely used) support the renaming of man pages via several means--patching the
source, update-alternatives(1), and so on.  Adding a layer of indirection to
this simple, stand-alone man page seems like a complication of the build
system (and man page cross references) for little benefit.

I therefore decline to make this change.


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