[TUHS] man Macro Package and pdfmark

[Jon Steinhart]

Richard Salz writes:
>
> > 'The problem is that the ecosystem has been fragmented by people doing
> their "documentation" in their preferred formats instead of in a common
> (man) format.
>
> Damn those unauthorized developers.  How dare they write code that doesn't
> meet standards.
>
> Get off my lawn.

The relevant TUHS part of it that maybe some folks here can speak to is how
did UNIX remain so cohesive for so long?  How were decisions made?  Of course,
this started to fall apart with System III and such as things got more clunky.

I've probably said this before, but today I see way too much "string theory
programming".  What I mean by that is the "I have an idea so I'll just start
my own universe that doesn't play well with others rather than extending the
existing ecosystem" model.  That's my beef with texinfo; there was already
an existing functional system and rather than making some improvements a new
incompatible universe was created.

Noel Chiappa writes:
> I am _sooo_ tempted to say 'What do you think source is for?' :-)

I think that this is part of the problem, have you looked at the source for
any modern package?  It's pretty impenetrable.  I see a lot of overly complex,
poorly written code with no documentation.  That makes it really difficult for
someone to extend or otherwise modify it.  It's probably easier to create a
new universe than understand an existing one.

Jon