Re: A short mdoc history.

[Ingo Schwarze <schwarze@usta.de>]

Hi Kristaps,

> Can anybody provide a short history of the mdoc package?  I'd like to
> slap it into the HISTORY section once and for all.  Ingo has already
> provided a useful one for man.7.

Checking the UNIX archive, i found that the following is correct
as a starting point:

  The mdoc language first appeared as a macro package for the troff
  typesetting system in 4.4 BSD.

In particular, tmac.an was present in 4.3 BSD, but tmac.doc was not.
The original Berkeley Copyright in 4.4 BSD was:

  @(#)doc 5.11 (Berkeley) 7/14/92

> (This history should cover the re-write of mdoc.7 in 2000.)

Hm, looking at

  groff-1.20.1/tmac/doc.tmac

the file still has a Berkeley Copyright,

  @(#)doc 8.1 (Berkeley) 06/08/93

an then:

.\" Modified by jjc@jclark.com as follows: the doc-* files are assumed to be
.\" installed as mdoc/doc-* rather than tmac.doc-* (the filename
.\" `tmac.doc-common' would be too long); when using groff, the doc-* files
.\" are loaded using the `mso' request.
.\"
.\" Modified by
.\"
.\"   Werner LEMBERG <wl@gnu.org>      and
.\"   Ruslan Ermilov <ru@freebsd.org>
.\"
.\" to make it more readable: using long names and many groff features,
.\" updating and extending documentation, etc.

Carelessly, this does not even state the Copyright years of the work
done by James Clark, Werner Lemberg and Ruslan Ermilov...

So it does not look like it was completely rewritten,
rather, it says "modified".

One would need to do more research on the GNU troff site
and look at old groff distributions, but my time is out now...

Yours,
  Ingo
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