On Sun Aug 14, 2022 at 9:56 AM EDT, Ingo Schwarze wrote: > Hi, > > DJ Chase wrote on Sat, Aug 13, 2022 at 05:27:34PM +0000: > > > Have we ever considered a de jure *roff standard? > > No, i think that would be pure madness given the amount of working > time available in any of the roff projects. > > […] This is very sad to hear. > > It could also lead to more users & use cases because existing > > users could count on systems supporting certain features, so > > they could use *roff in more situations, which would lead to > > more exposure. > > You appear to massively overrate the importance end-users > typically attribute to standardization. That’s probably because *I* massively overrate the importance of standardization (I mean I literally carry a standards binder with me). Still, though, it’s rather annoying that end users — especially programmers — don’t value standards as much. > > It’s ridiculous that *roff isn’t part of POSIX when it was Unix’s > > killer feature. > > You are welcome to spend the many years required to change that. > But be aware that some standardization efforts that are part of > POSIX resulted in parts of the standard that are barely useable > for practical work. One famous example is make(1). > > Don't get me wrong: i think standardization is very nice to have, > should be taken very seriously when available, and provides some > value even when the standardization effort mostly failed, like in > the case of make(1). But standardization is absolutely not cheap. > To the contrary, it is usually significantly more expensive than > implementation and documentation. Would an informal de jure standard be of any use? Like how TOML just has a specification, but it’s somewhat usable as a standard because it’s been pretty stable and because it’s written clearly enough. Cheers, -- DJ Chase They, Them, Theirs
