Re: [groff] Skip the stripper?

[Peter Schaffter]

On Fri, Mar 09, 2018, Doug McIlroy wrote:
> 
> I wholeheartedly support eliminating the stripper. It's an
> unnecessary step that complicates understanding and maintaining
> the distribution package. And to an even greater degree it
> obfuscates code that users (who have no interest in the arcana
> of maintenance) may want to consult to unravel fine points or
> bugs in macro packages. The only argument for stripping is
> a supposed efficiency gain, which I suspect is too minute to
> matter.

Truth is, it's much easier for me if om.tmac isn't stripped.  I
help users off list who sometimes want to do non-standard things
with mom that involve site-specific changes to the file.  If the
user has only a distro-packaged groff, their om.tmac is the stripped
one.  For the purpose, it's nearly unusable, lacking even
rudimentary indenting.  I generally tell them to download the
tarball from the mom website so we're working on the same page, so
to speak.  It's a helluva lot easier than telling them to pull the
sources, grab om.tmac-u, and plug it into their system as om.tmac,
but it would be even easier if I could tell them simply to open the
installed (indented and commented) om.tmac.

-- 
Peter Schaffter
http://www.schaffter.ca