Conversation
brauner@mastodon.social

Christian Brauner 🦊🐺

Edited 10 days ago

Honestly, I'm prepared to start a kickstarter for whatever amount of money it takes for someone to port Linux man-pages from groff to markdown.

@cyphar is doing the important work as usual

https://lore.kernel.org/20250807-new-mount-api-v2-0-558a27b8068c@cyphar.com

but groff must be one of the original sins. Like, Moses came down from the mountain and was like "don't do groff" but accidently dropped the first stone table or something. Like seriously, everytime I have to look at patches I die a little inside.

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funkylab@mastodon.social

Marcus Müller

Reply to @brauner@mastodon.social
Edited 10 days ago

@brauner @cyphar I'm big fan of not having .*roff around as source files these day; I consider them compiled output typically generated from markdown or similarly useful formats. It's just not a good format for documentation (no real hyperlinks, very restricted formatting); it's a "tolerable" intermediate representation for console rendering of documentation.

(me ranting on that can be found on the web, e.g., https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/797857/106650, and I don't seem to be the only one, even among graybeards)

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paulmckrcu

Paul E. McKenney

Reply to @brauner@mastodon.social
@brauner @cyphar The original nroff and troff from which groff descends had to do typesetting (and in troff's case, phtoto-typesetting) on systems having a 64Kbyte address space. So Moses simply did not have sufficient space to record nroff and troff as sins on his tablets. Plus there is not a huge number of people who, like me, are older than nroff and troff, but I am here to tell you that both nroff and troff seemed pretty nice to me back in the day.

So who knows? It just might be time for a change in format. After all, I long ago made the switch from nroff/troff to LaTeX. ;-)
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vbabka@mastodon.social

Vlastimil Babka 🇨🇿🇪🇺🇺🇦

Reply to

@ljs @paulmckrcu @brauner @cyphar tried building it now after you fixed your RAM speeds?

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paulmckrcu

Paul E. McKenney

Reply to
@ljs @brauner @cyphar LaTeX is not perfect, and it has a learning curve, but it is quite capable. Especially if you cheat like I do and so some of the work in other scripting languages.

As to the LaTeX build times, I suspect that they are much more tolerable when your book is less than 700 pages. ;-)
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paulmckrcu

Paul E. McKenney

Reply to
@ljs @brauner @cyphar Huh. Maybe I should bite the bullet and learn TiKZ. ;-)
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lanodan@queer.hacktivis.me

Haelwenn /элвэн/ triskell

Reply to @brauner@mastodon.social
@brauner @cyphar Nah, markdown would be pretty horrible unless it's effectively with a designated tool like scdoc/lowdown (pretty please not pandoc, haskell is x86-only in most distros), because it's anything but a reliable format (even with common mark, since it allows different rendering options).

And then there's the hell of extensions like tables.
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hipsterelectron@circumstances.run

d@nny disc@ mc²

Reply to @lanodan@queer.hacktivis.me

@lanodan @brauner @cyphar i liked the latex proposal in another comment

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lanodan@queer.hacktivis.me

Haelwenn /элвэн/ triskell

Reply to @hipsterelectron@circumstances.run

@hipsterelectron @brauner @cyphar I think few years of being with a slow connection and low-DPI displays radicalized me against anything TeX.

If not markdown (or strongly markdown-like), rst2man (note: linux kernel already uses rst for ./Documentation/) or pod2man, could also be decent alternatives.
And already have decades of usage in various projects.

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hipsterelectron@circumstances.run

d@nny disc@ mc²

Reply to @lanodan@queer.hacktivis.me

@lanodan @brauner @cyphar oh i love rst

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