Hi Michael, Michael Kerrisk (man-pages) wrote on Wed, Feb 27, 2019 at 03:28:19PM +0100: > I am *not at all* attached to keeping to these pages. Their > presence in the project has always felt a bit anomalous to me. > > Back when I took over maintainership in 2004, there were a small > number of pages that used mdoc markup, and so it seemed wise > to keep these pages. Over time, most of those few pages were > converted to 'man' markup, and today the only other page in the > project that still uses mdoc markup is in queue(3). So, there is > just about zero value in having 'mdoc' documentation come with > the "Linux man-pages" box. > > Since I seldom use mdoc markup myself, I've had no reason to > monitor pages such as groff_mdoc(7) or the mdoc(7) page > provided my ther 'mandoc' project and compare them with > the pages provided by "Linux man-pages". Now I've had a > closer look. It's sad. > > I've removed mdoc(7) and mdoc.samples(7) from "Linux -man-pages". > > That felt good. Yes, that sounds entirely reasonable. Even though the Linux man-pages project is very portable and can be installed and used on almost any operating system, i think most users probably use it on various distributions of Linux-based operating systems. And Linux-based operating systems almost invariably provide a GNU troff (groff) package installed by default, so i expect the vast majority of your users will still have mdoc documentation on their system, in the form of groff_mdoc(7). The mandoc package is also slowly becoming more popular on Linux. For example, optional packages exist for Debian, Ubuntu, Gentoo, Arch, Alpine, Void, Slackware, Crux, ... So quite a few Linux users may already have Kristaps' modern mdoc(7) manual page in addition to the classical groff_mdoc(7). Free non-Linux systems that offer access to the Linux man-pages project anyway - see https://man.openbsd.org/Linux-4.16/ for an example - typically include mandoc(1) by default (e.g. FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, DragonFly, illumos, Minix, ...) - so those already have the mdoc(7) manual. I would no doubt like to see mdoc(7) used more in Linux contexts, too, because Cynthia managed to reach an excellent balance between simplicity, conciseness, mnemonic value, and semantic markup power - the semantic search facilities mdoc(7) supports nowadays are very valuable in practice, and i think the difficulty of learning it is often vastly exaggerated even for casual users. Just look at the MACRO OVERVIEW in mdoc(7), there aren't really that many macros: https://man.openbsd.org/mdoc.7#MACRO_OVERVIEW If you want to see something that is *really* excessively complicated, try DocBook for a change... :-/ Anyway, that doesn't mean the Linux man-pages project has to document mdoc(7) given that it is not currently using it in any significant way. Yours, Ingo
