Proposed: drop groffer (was: contrib/groffer/roff2.1.man)

[G. Branden Robinson]

Hi Ingo!

At 2020-04-19T13:55:37+0200, Ingo Schwarze wrote:
> G. Branden Robinson wrote on Sun, Apr 19, 2020 at 07:16:58AM -0400:
> > commit 762fab3e454786cc5e666f6d6324f455470b8ea4
[...]
> >     roff2.1.man generates several nearly-identical pages from the
> >     same source*.  Use register name based on the name of the
> >     generated page, so they don't collide.
[...]
> >     * This seems pretty gratituitous to me; their interfaces don't
> >     differ at all (no difference in accepted options, for example),
> >     and each page makes reference to all the others.  I find that a
> >     dubious choice, and would just have one page with a
> >     comma-delimited set of topics in the "Name" section.
> 
> Indeed, good find, that's utter stupidity.  It would be nice to have
> that cleaned up.
> 
> Then again, the whole contrib/groffer directory is an abomination
> that i suggest should be deleted outright, without any replacement.
> It's fragile wrappers on top of wrappers on top of wrappers (remember
> that even groff itself is already a wrapper!), of ridiculous
> complexity, that provide no additional functionality whatsoever.
> 
> Less bloat is more.
> 
> It is a landmark symptom of the absense of software design when,
> instead of making the program itself small, simple, and easy to
> use, people write a wrapper that clearly doesn't achieve simplicity
> either, neither of the code nor of the usage.

Every time I look at cleaning it up, I despair of the task.  It saps my
energy to even contemplate it.  Plenty of Bernd's other contributions to
groff I find interesting or valuable, but groffer, to me, just seems
ill-conceived.

It seems like a wrapper around grog(1) that got out of control.  In my
opinion, we should, at most, be advising people how to write shell
aliases or functions to wrap grog and target an output device of their
preference.  Let people help themselves instead of trying to be
everything to everyone.

So, what do the folks on the list think?

Does anyone object to just deleting groffer?

Regards,
Branden

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