[TUHS] Another "craft" discussion topic - mindless tool proliferation

Larry McVoy lm at mcvoy.com
Fri Sep 22 10:38:19 AEST 2017


On Thu, Sep 21, 2017 at 05:30:50PM -0700, Lyndon Nerenberg wrote:
> 
> > On Sep 21, 2017, at 5:02 PM, Greg 'groggy' Lehey <grog at lemis.com> wrote:
> > 
> > There was a good reason for that.  To my recollection, they hadn't
> > been maintained At All, and they were decades out of date.  While they
> > were interesting for their historical content, as user/programmer
> > documentation they were useless at best and misleading or dangerous at
> > worst.
> 
> So throwing them out was easier than updating them.
> 
> As I recall, the real reason they got tossed was because some factions
> wanted to remove the *roff tools from the base OS, meaning the viewable
> versions of the documents could no longer be produced.

Huh?  What about the man pages?

And removing roff from BSD is gonna make me mad.  I'm about to start
doing some work on BSD so maybe I'll make some noise.  Or did the *roff
tools stick around?




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