Re: [groff] A typo on fsf groff wiki page, and question about releasing

[Bertrand Garrigues]

Hi Stephanie,

On Sat, Dec 30 2017 at 04:55:18 AM, Stephanie Björk <address@hidden> wrote:
[...]
> I would love to maintain Groff after I finish university, which should
> be in 10 years' time because I'm still in high school.

After university with a full-time job you will have much less free time
(I wish I were still a student...).  Why don't you have a try right now?

> And since Groff is getting distributed widely and C++ is only getting
> more and more popular

Little disgression (of course, personal opinion, nothing objective): I
think that C++ will face strong competition from new languages like Rust
or Go, and decline.  I'm primarily a C developer, but if I would need to
start a new project I would prefer Go over C++, unless it's really
low-level or embedded software, in which case I would prefer C over C++.

Also, groff code is quite old and looks more like 'C with class' and
doesn't use templates; a real C++ programmer would probably be find the
code odd and baroque (I like it because I prefer a lot C over C++).

> I am quite certain that someone will have taken the job to maintain
> Groff and made a few more release

I volounteered to make the next release, there are some technical
problems (no access to GNU ftp) but I hope it will be solved soon.

> before I even get there.

Again, if you feel you are interested in developing into groff I think
you should not wait such a long time.  There are some big topics, like
fonts management and changing the format algorithm into a
paragraph-oriented algorithm.  I've started to work on the 2nd subject,
although due to lack of time I haven't made any significant progress
recently.  If you are interested feel free to join the dev (see
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/groff/2017-11/msg00079.html).

Regards,

Bertrand Garrigues