Re: [TUHS] Demise of TeX and groff (was: roff(7))

[Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com>]

On Tue, Jan 11, 2022 at 12:41:37PM -0800, Jon Steinhart wrote:
> Larry McVoy writes:
> > I wrote the GUIs for BitKeeper, I could absolutely give you exactly 
> > what you want.  Really, what you are describing is our code review
> > system which could done done completely in a web browser but if you
> > needed to hack on things, you cloned it and hacked on it and pushed.
> 
> You were looking for a retirement project if I remember correctly.
> While it's probably out of scope for this mailing list, I would be
> interested in how you would handle things like an editor proposing
> a change that would involve not just word changes, but formatting.
> A non-roffer would need to have some way to show those changes and
> to have them pushed back into the appropriate requests and reformatted.

I've done this.  We wrote our own contract with the help a great lawyer
at Fenwick and West.  I showed him how one document was producing around
8 different licenses, from your basic nobody version all the way up to
Intel or HP or whoever master license agreements.  Once he saw how you
could do that, he said "this is so much better than maintaining 8 
different, but mostly the same, documents".  Exactly.

He editted the roff input directly.  I gave him a copy of BitKeeper 
and he used that to check in.  Comments were check in comments.