Re: [Groff] Status of the portability work, and plans for the future

[Gunnar Ritter]

"Eric S. Raymond" <address@hidden> wrote:

> Gunnar Ritter <address@hidden>:
> > > > Maybe. But still the tools should not complain if a troff
> > > > expert has decided that something is safe.
> > >
> > > And how are they going to do that?  Mental telepathy? :-)
> > 
> > As I wrote in the text following, by separating a "lint"
> > (or "-Wall") mode and silent regular use.
>
> That's not a bad idea, but it seems to me to solve a slightly different 
> problem than the one I thought we were discussing.  Anyway, the
> intention would be better expressed by having an "expert" flag that
> switches *off* lint-like warnings -- that way, authors (knowing that
> users would not in general use that flag) wouldn't be tempted
> to simply skip the validation step entirely.

Yes, and authors would also get nasty bug reports from
people who compile their manual pages with the switch
turned off because it is the default. This would be as
bad as gcc shipping with -Wall enabled by default.

> > > And that is what, <1% of our potential userbase?
> > 
> > >50% of those users that actually develop software, write
> > useful bug reports, maintain the documentation, . . . ?
>
> And you think these wise and savvy hackers are going to be terminally
> offended by an often-unnoticeable drop in the quality of nroff output to
> a terminal emulator, especially when they will know that in return
> they can go to a browser and get (a) prettier fonts with proportional
> spacing, (b) images, (c) color, and (d) *hyperlinks*?

I know for sure that many people will prefer man output
on the console since they do not care about (a) to (d) but
about having quick access to informative texts. This is
simply because these people can already use hypertext
documentation (e.g. using the KDE system we examined) but
do not do so.

Of course I do not think that people would turn away from
Unix if it were no longer possible to add pure nroff markup
to manual pages. But this _is_ possible without any loss in
quality with the hypertext systems, so there is no reason
not to do it if one wants to.

> man(1) is not sacred, and I actually find attitudes like yours
> kind of insulting, as though you think long-time man users like me are
> so utterly lacking in mental flexibility as to be unable to cope with
> even a tiny speedbump on the road to better things.

Well, if you like to use hypertext documentation, then I have
nothing against that. But I happen to know enough people who
prefer man on a terminal regardless of your opinion on that.

> It's a point for the future, really, and goes back to the
> philosophical question I opened up at the beginning of this
> discussion: is the groff community ready to accept that the future of
> on-line documentation belongs to hypertext and that man is a legacy
> format that must adapt itself to the new reality, rather than holding
> it back?

The future format of _our_ online documentation, the
documentation written by free software maintainers, is
just the format we prefer to write our documentation in.
We principally do not need to care about people who try
to convince us about their view of our future. Remember
that most free software projects, especially the smaller
ones, do not really depend on any people except those who
spend their time coding for them.

That said, it would be rather stupid to ignore the fact
that many people like to read our documentation in a
browser-based hypertext system. Actually, in certain
circumstances such as getting information about a project
before I install it, I like to do that too. This is why -
you remember - I have always advocated to write manual
pages such that they are convertible to hypertext here.

But if you now go as far as trying to convince me that
my (and not only my) preferred method of reading Unix
documentation is obsolete, I can only laugh at you.
I have my my own nroff and my own manual pages and 
my own man including browser support and am well able
to write a converter from just about hypertext-anything
to nroff if I would consider that necessary. And I
also have enough friends who will continue to maintain
the other software a terminal-based Unix user interface
needs.

So please stop this, it leads to nowhere. Let us rather
concentrate on making manual pages accessible to all of
nroff, doclifter, and HTML converters, as we did until
now.

        Gunnar