Re: [groff] A typo on fsf groff wiki page, and question about releasing

[Stephanie Björk]

I think part of the reason why the release for Groff has been so slow and
sparse could be because of two things: the patches aren't ``significant''
enough for some degree of ``significant,'' there are not enough maintainers
and thus not enough motivation to publicly release or effect anything, this
is a phenomenon that does happen with software at times.  Again, this is
just my opinion.  As far as I'm concerned, Groff needs maintainers.  Now,
in my experience, if the software is reasonably good, slow releases aren't
really anything bad.  Software releases shouldn't be rushed into a goal;
releases should only happen when vox populi and the maintainers feels it is
ready.  I wouldn't consider Groff unmaintained, though.

> To be more concrete, I'm looking forward to seeing groff 1.22.4 in Ubuntu
> 18.04 LTS, which will be the base of tons of other derivative Linux
> distributions. Otherwise we might miss it and have to wait for another 2
> years.

What do you mean by 2 years?  I thought Ubuntu had their releases every n
months where n < 12.  10 months I think?

P.S. I would love to maintain Groff after I finish university, which should
be in 10 years' time because I'm still in high school.  And since Groff is
getting distributed widely and C++ is only getting more and more popular, I
am quite certain that someone will have taken the job to maintain Groff and
made a few more releases before I even get there.

On Fri, Dec 29, 2017 at 2:12 PM, Boyuan Yang <address@hidden> wrote:

> [cc-me please]
>
> 在 2017年11月21日星期二 CST 下午7:49:51，Blake McBride 写道：
> > Agreed.  This also maximizes the chances the distros will pick up the
> > latest version.
> >
> > On Tue, Nov 21, 2017 at 1:17 AM, Boyuan Yang <address@hidden> wrote:
> > > [cc-me please, I'm not on list]
> > >
> > > Hello all,
> > >
> > > I found a typo on the Wiki page of Groff under directory.fsf.org. On
> the
> > > page
> > > [1], the latest version number is "1.23", not 1.22.3. I think it is a
> typo
> > > and
> > > can be fixed easily.
> > >
> > > Besides, I have a question about the release plan of future groff
> (e.g.,
> > > 1.22.4). It's been 3 years since last release of groff. Maybe it's
> time to
> > > release another new groff version with all patches available in the
> VCS.
> > >
> > > Sincerely,
> > > Boyuan Yang
> > >
> > > [1] https://directory.fsf.org/wiki/Groff
>
> Is there any following plans about this?
>
> To be more concrete, I'm looking forward to seeing groff 1.22.4 in Ubuntu
> 18.04 LTS, which will be the base of tons of other derivative Linux
> distributions. Otherwise we might miss it and have to wait for another 2
> years.
>
> Regards,
> Boyuan Yang