[dwm] dwm and patches

Firstly, I've been away for 3 days which is why I've been slow responding.

|On Mon, 2006-09-25 at 08:15 +0200, Anselm R. Garbe wrote:
|> On Sun, Sep 24, 2006 at 09:30:04PM +0000, David Tweed wrote:
|> > predominant, they have to go with that. It just really irks me that
|> > the unix-derived world the standard for documentation is in a language
|> > that's _only_ used for manual pages. Hell, I've learned (or at least had
|> > to at some points produce stuff in) tex,latex,hmtl, xml, docbook,pythondoc,
|> > doxygen, and I'm kinda bored with it all.
|
|The book "Unix Text Processing" is available here in a variety of
|formats:
|http://home.alltel.net/kollar/utp/

Just to be clear. Firstly, all I really wanted to do in my original message
was to find out if there was a way to do manpage writing/modification
without having to deal with having to figure out troff.

Secondly, I wasn't suggesting that roff (or whatever the language is called)
was exceptionally hard. It's just that it's _yet another_ language to have to figure
out, which given my understanding (at the time) that these days (eg, the last
ten years) it wasn't used for anything other than manpages and that I really
don't have _time_ for all the intellectually interesting projects I want to
tackle, let alone the vast mass of languages that seem to be needed to do
only one thing, annoys me.

FWIW, I still think that the proliferation of "not more than marginally
better than each other" languages raises the barrier for "itch-scratcher"
code modifiers. Of course whether that's important is dependent on
your view of how important they are.

> troff has been there for ages, and it is not a man-page
> language, it is simply a formatting-language. Those guys at Bell
> Labs wrote papers and books in troff+eqn. troff makes it easy to
> present man pages in a vt100 pager, as PostScript document, as
> html, or whatever you want. Uriel made his presentations with
> troff btw.

Note I didn't say it "was" a manpage language, but that it was only
_used_ nowadays for manpages (although I think I missed off the
nowadays). I'm happy to learn how somebody has decided to structure
yet another computer langugage _provided I can amortise the cost of that learning
over a lot of end work_; my "annoyance" with man-pages is that I'll
certainly write at most twenty over the course of my life. Uriel writing his
presentations in roff presents a counterexample that .

Anyway, thanks to Antoni Grzymala I now have a set of tools to
avoid that. I'll stop ranting now :-)

Sorry for the flame war,
cheers, dave tweed
Received on Thu Sep 28 2006 - 12:42:22 UTC