Re: groff inquiry

[quinlan@spectrum.cs.bucknell.edu (Daniel Quinlan)]

Ian Jackson <iwj10@cus.cam.ac.uk> writes:

> 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.

grog and afmtodit are not required to read manual pages.  Would you
feel better if we made Perl a "recommended" package?

> 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 ?

grog, maybe.  afmtodit, not on your life.  However, I'm not going to
touch it.  Just _don't_run_them_ if you don't install Perl.  They are
really just a small part of groff and they are not required to read
manual pages.

Dan

--
Daniel Quinlan  <quinlan@spectrum.cs.bucknell.edu>