trying to improve mandoc Solaris support

[Joerg Schilling via buildfarm]

Dagobert Michelsen via buildfarm <buildfarm at lists.opencsw.org> wrote:

> Hi Ingo,
>
> > Am 18.03.2015 um 15:13 schrieb Ingo Schwarze <schwarze at usta.de>:
> > 
> > Hi,
> > 
> > this is the maintainer of mandoc (mdocml.bsd.lv) speaking.
> > 
> > For the last few years, the result of asking for release testing
> > of mandoc has consistently been that a large fraction of portability
> > issues reported, and in particular usually the most severe ones,
> > up to and including incomplete POSIX support, were related to
> > commercial SUN Solaris or Oracle Solaris platforms - compared to
> > that, OpenBSD, FreeBSD, NetBSD and DragonFly very rarely cause
> > portability issues, and the issues that arise on Linux are typically
> > easy to solve.  Even illumos appears to be less hostile to foreign
> > software than commercial Solaris...
> > 
> > So it might make sense that i do systematic testing of mandoc
> > on commercial Solaris.  Is that possible with your project?
> > A Solaris 10 user (Sevan Janiyan) pointed me to
> > 
> >  http://www.opencsw.org/extend-it/signup/to-upstream-maintainers/
> > 
> > which seems to indicate just that.
>
> Sure, our buildfarm is equipped with Solaris 8, 9, 10 and 11 both
> Sparc and x86 and multiple compilers. Just send me your ssh public
> key and intended user name and I???ll set up an account for you.

I did recently run a test with the mandoc program on Solaris and tried to 
check the results. In general, the tbl support is extremely bad. Many tables
are unreadable or disappear from the output.

In general, the mandoc _format_ (introduced with BSD-4.4-lite) is not a problem 
on Solaris if you use the enhanced man program I created some years ago and 
that is published together with Schillix-ON, see:

https://sourceforge.net/p/schillix-on/schillix-on/ci/default/tree/usr/src/cmd/man/

What I did was to take the mandoc troff macros from BSD-4.4-lite (those that 
still work with original troff) and added a few minor fixes (e.g. a Y2000 fix).

What I don't understand is why the mandoc program was written at all. Compared 
to most software that has been recently developped, it looks nice, but if I 
remember correctly, the sourcecode for "mandoc" is 2-3x more that the 
sourcecode for "man", "troff", "tbl", "soelim", "col" ... all together and the 
current state seems to be that only 80-90% of the Solaris man pages work with 
the mandoc program. 

The former problem that groff is under GPL is no longer a problem since the 
original AT&T troff has been made OpenSource under a free license together with 
OpenSolaris in June 2005.

Can you enlighten me please?

Jörg

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