[TUHS] Unix tools to aid in the production of Internet RFCs?

[Fabio Scotoni]

On 9/2/20 8:03 AM, Random832 wrote:
> On Thu, Aug 27, 2020, at 13:51, Tony Finch wrote:
>> Yes, very Not Unix. As Dan wondered, the best list for this question is
>> internet-history, I think :-)
>>
>> The Network Information Center was at SRI, and they used the ARC NLS: Doug
>> Englebart's Augmentation Research Center oN-Line System [1] but I get the
>> impression that by the 1990s nroff on Unix was the main tool for producing
>> RFCs.
> 
> Was there a particular set of macros used? custom macros? ms? or does raw "nroff" have an easy way to produce those page headers and other things used in RFCs?
> 

RFC 2223 ("Instructions to RFC Authors") from October 1997 mentions -ms
with a specific setup that is described in the appendix.
It noted that "[g]enerally, we use the very simplest nroff features."
For completeness:
That RFC has later been amended by RFC 5741 ("RFC Streams, Headers, and
Boilerplates") and RFC 6949 ("RFC Series Format Requirements and Future
Development").

(RFC 7990 from December 2016 then essentially did away with nroff as far
as I can tell.)

Interestingly, someone named Bruce Lilly made an effort to write a more
extensive macro package specifically for the purpose of being used for
RFCs, see I-D.draft-lilly-using-troff-04.
Unlike the process based around the ms macros cut together with an awk
script, his macros actually did the correct pagination on its own.
Some of the things on the website linked there are lost by now, such as
rfcref, idref and abnff, which were intended to integrate with that
macro package.

Fabio