Re: C--

[Michel Talon <talon@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Sascha Wildner wrote:

> Justin C. Sherrill wrote:
>> On Fri, June 1, 2007 3:52 pm, Sascha Wildner wrote:
>> 
>>> So... I'm kinda unsure here if the perspective of being able to remove
>>> C++ from the build justifies reverting to the old mdoc macros. What do
>>> the rest of you think?
>> 
>> Would there be any quantifiable benefit greater than the increased hassle
>> when importing man pages?  You didn't list any, so it sounds like there's
>> no real reason to do it.
> 
> Well, the heirloom-doctools are written in C, as opposed to groff (C++),
> which afaik is the only thing in base that needs C++. Replacing groff
> could mean we would no longer have to build C++ by default (only when,
> say, WANT_CPLUSPLUS or so is set). So, shorter build time, smaller ISOs,
> etc.
> 
> Other benefits (?): The heirloom doctools accept UTF8 input (while groff

They have also more powerful formatting capabilities, such as hanging
indents, like the recent versions of pdftex.

> can only output it, but I'm not 100% sure). Also they're derived from
> the original tools (think of gawk vs. one true awk).

Here gawk has at least one feature that awk doesn't have, and which is 
important, the possibility of putting time stamps, very useful when
filtering log messages through awk.

> 
> Stuff visible to the user: Not much, I think.
> 
> Sascha
> 

-- 
Michel Talon