Re: GNU chem maintenance

[Marc Chantreux]

hello,

On Thu, Nov 14, 2024 at 01:30:37PM +0100, Norwid Behrnd wrote:
> Dear Branden
> 
> One the papers which cite the `chem` paper by Bentley, Jelinsky, Kernigham I
> became aware of is "LITTLE LANGUAGES FOR PICTURES IN AWK" by Bentley.  There
> is a small section (around figure 7) about `chem`, too -- mirrored/rescued
> for example in Arnold Robbin's public `dformat` repository
> 
> <https://github.com/arnoldrobbins/dformat>

I want to share my private history about dformat resurection:

https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/groff/2021-11/msg00008.html

Which led to:

https://github.com/eiro/dformat/issues/1

then I hacked on some improvements and realized it was gawk which is
not the default awk in many unix and we have to stay POSIX.

I had too strategies to discuss with the community:

* focus on posix awk (testing with busybox awk, mawk and BSD implementations)
* revamp the whole thing in perl which is
  * already a groff rep.
  * a much better awk than awk (even the g one)

I also realized I was unconfortable to touch anything without having a
test suite so I was trying to find some existing use of dformat to make
sure the rendering was ok.

Then covid happened and took me away from the world for a long time …
as my health is getting better, I started to read that list again
and just saw that hjoertel is now 2 commits ahead my repo but I have to admit I
would have commented both of them

* ERROR should be a global command to pipe in
* $* should be "$@"
* gawk should be removed

I had no more need for the tool for the moment but I really think
adding a version and shipping it as a debian/guix/alpine package should
be a really simple but helpful thing and if someone know how to dig
on archives to create a test suite, I will be really happy to help
improving the existing base so we can have extensions to add colors when
\(.g is set.

> For now, it is not a spontaneous agreement on my side to work on the code
> because it has been for a quite long time I did not write Perl.

Perl is one of my favorite langages and I could help on it if you help
me the way I need help on dformat: do the QA and research to be sure the
tool behave the way it do.

regards,

-- 
Marc Chantreux
Pôle CESAR (Calcul et services avancés à la recherche)
Université de Strasbourg
14 rue René Descartes,
BP 80010, 67084 STRASBOURG CEDEX
03.68.85.60.79