Re: [hackers] [dmenu][patch] Rewrite manpages to use mdoc(7) format.

From: Chris Down <chris_AT_chrisdown.name>
Date: Wed, 21 Nov 2018 10:33:09 +0000

Hey Stephen,

Stephen Gregoratto writes:
>This expresses the same information in much simpler syntax, along with a
>hefty line reduction. Tested using groff 1.22.3 & OpenBSD mandoc 1.14.4.
>Also replaced the sed command with cp in the Makefile, as mdoc pages
>are versioned by date.

Could you go over the desire for this in a bit more detail? Most of us are
already fairly familiar with roff syntax since it's used so heavily across
suckless projects, so I don't see any immediately compelling reason to switch
to using mdoc's alternative DSL/macros just for ~50 lines less (especially when
some of that is just aesthetic). In general I think it would be nice to avoid
having everyone learn yet another thing whenever they want to edit man pages.

I could agree that, if we were doing this from scratch, it might make sense to
use mdoc, but it makes less sense considering the inertia we already have using
roff directly(ish) in dmenu and other suckless projects.

If you could go over your particular motivations for this change, that would be
helpful, and may lend some more justification to it being desirable to merge
it.
Received on Wed Nov 21 2018 - 11:33:09 CET