Re: [groff] Release Candidate 1.22.4.rc3

[Ingo Schwarze]

Hi,

G. Branden Robinson wrote on Wed, Nov 28, 2018 at 08:03:26PM -0500:

> The Texinfo manual is far too easy to overlook (I've certainly been
> guilty of it) partly because the Texinfo ecosystem itself is not very
> healthy.  Last I checked (years ago), the texinfo development mailing
> list was openly discussing its options for winding up the project.  It's
> just not very ergonomic for anyone except militant Emacs partisans, and
> pinfo, the info browser with key bindings friendly to mere mortals, is
> no longer actively maintained either, as I understand it.
> 
> On top of that, our build does not even generate the manual in TeX form.
> Which makes _perfect_ sense from a bootstrapping perspective--one
> shouldn't need one typesetting system to build the other--

While i'm well aware that what i'm saying here is a commitment to
a huge project, i'm willing to translate the whole groff texinfo
documentation into groff_mdoc(7).  It is going to cost me weeks of
full-time work at least, but it seems worth it to get the groff
documentation out of an obsolete format and out of a fragmented
form, and to get rid of a hidden dependency of groff on the other
typesetting system, TeX.  It would imply that groff could build its
own documentation for the terminal, in PDF, and in HTML.

I have done another translation project of similar size before this:
the translation of the OpenSSL perlpod(1) documentation to become the
LibreSSL mdoc(7) documentation.

Yours,
  Ingo