Re: RFC: groff split (was Re: Packaging WM themes - question)
Herbert Xu <herbert@gondor.apana.org.au> wrote:
>Branden Robinson <branden@debian.org> wrote:
>> I would do the latter and have just 2 packages: groff-base and groff. I
>> don't think gxditview merits its own package since most people don't even
>> know what it is, and also because to meaningfully preview the output of the
>> DVI and PostScript engines outside groff-base, you're going to need X
>> anyway[1].
That last is a fair argument. Aoart from output to less common formats,
the remainder of the contents of groff (as will be) are for converting
font files and producing full-scale documents, which people are also
likely to want to preview graphically.
>Not everyone wants to preview them before printing. Think of a printer
>server for instance.
I've heard that some people (particularly non-Roman-alphabet users)
sometimes use gxditview as a fairly readable means of viewing man pages;
man will run it when invoked with -X. I can see an argument for putting
gxditview in the same place as the Japanese fonts, unless there are a
substantial number of people printing man pages from print servers with
minimal disk space (I appreciate that there are some, but it seems like
more of a minority use than gxditview - you can always print through the
print server from somewhere else).
Keeping gxditview in groff is also compelling from the point of view of
an upgrade path, now that I think of it, since a potato user who takes
no special action on upgrade will have the same set of groff-related
tools installed afterwards as beforehand.
Splitting gxditview out later if it proves worthwhile might well be
simpler than merging it back in after a failed experiment.
U-turn-ishly yours,
--
Colin Watson [cjw44@flatline.org.uk]
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