Re: groff inquiry
Brandon Allbery writes:
> [Daniel Quinlan writes:]
> | Interestingly enough, afmtodit and grog are Perl scripts. Yes, perl4
> | is now a required package for groff.
>
> A recent development, surely? On my Slackware 1.1.1 system grog is a shell
> script.
It seems like a bad idea to have Groff depend on Perl, because Perl is
otherwise a rather `optional' package that people (especially on small
systems) might want to leave out - if Groff depends on it they'll be
unable to do so, because you can't possibly give people a system where
they can't read the manpages.
I seem to remember that we decided against using Perl as an
installation tool for exactly this reason.
Would it be possible to rewrite afmtodit and grog without the use of
Perl, or can we just ignore the requirement and have only those two
programs fail when Perl isn't installed ?
Ian.
(BTW: Please don't let's have a language flamewar. I'm not bashing
Perl here - in fact, large chunks of my own system depend on it - but
we should try to accomodate people here, I think.)
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