On Thursday, 21 September 2017 at 17:38:19 -0700, Larry McVoy wrote:
> On Thu, Sep 21, 2017 at 05:30:50PM -0700, Lyndon Nerenberg wrote:
>>
>>> On Sep 21, 2017, at 5:02 PM, Greg 'groggy' Lehey <grog@lemis.com> wrote:
>>>
>>> There was a good reason for that.  To my recollection, they hadn't
>>> been maintained At All, and they were decades out of date.  While they
>>> were interesting for their historical content, as user/programmer
>>> documentation they were useless at best and misleading or dangerous at
>>> worst.
>>
>> So throwing them out was easier than updating them.
>>
>> As I recall, the real reason they got tossed was because some factions
>> wanted to remove the *roff tools from the base OS, meaning the viewable
>> versions of the documents could no longer be produced.
>
> Huh?  What about the man pages?

They're still there, and are being regularly updated.

> And removing roff from BSD is gonna make me mad.  I'm about to start
> doing some work on BSD so maybe I'll make some noise.  Or did the
> *roff tools stick around?

roff in FreeBSD has been groff for as long as I can recall, possibly
since 4.4BSD.  There has been some discussion about moving it to the
Ports Collection, but it's certainly not going away.

Greg
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