[TUHS] man-page style

[Larry McVoy]

On Thu, Nov 29, 2018 at 12:13:53PM -0700, Grant Taylor via TUHS wrote:
> On 11/29/2018 11:48 AM, Larry McVoy wrote:
> >Indeed.  Sendmail got a lot of hate but mostly from people in pure
> >user at host.domain worlds.
> 
> Do you have any idea why the user at host.domain community hated on Sendmail
> more than other communities?

I can't back this up with a citation but my belief is that was just that
everything worked for them, it was a simple system, you could write an
SMTP server in a tiny perl script, so why all the complexity?

If you live in a simple world you see things as being simple.  Sendmail
was not living in a simple world.

> >I lived in the UUCP / BitNet / Arpanet world and while sendmail was
> >definitely not the easiest thing to configure, once you got it right it
> >just kept working (unlike UUCP that seemed to need constant babysitting).
> 
> I think that's still fair to say.
> 
> Though simple Sendmail configurations are relatively easy to set up.

Yeah, it's been easy since whoever did the macros so you picked a config
close to yours, changed a couple of host names and off you go.

It's surprisingly similar to troff.  Writing docs in raw troff is doable,
I've done it a bunch of times, but it's more pleasant with a macro 
package (I'm a fan of -ms, tried the others, just keep coming back to
-ms because it hits the sweet spot of enough stuff without being overly
complicated).