svn commit: r47608 - head/en_US.ISO8859-1/htdocs/news/status

Sat Oct 17 21:40:36 UTC 2015

Author: bjk
Date: Sat Oct 17 21:40:34 2015
New Revision: 47608
URL: https://svnweb.freebsd.org/changeset/doc/47608

Log:
  Add report on the mandoc and roff toolchains, from bapt

Modified:
  head/en_US.ISO8859-1/htdocs/news/status/report-2015-07-2015-09.xml

Modified: head/en_US.ISO8859-1/htdocs/news/status/report-2015-07-2015-09.xml
==============================================================================

--- head/en_US.ISO8859-1/htdocs/news/status/report-2015-07-2015-09.xml	Sat Oct 17 21:20:08 2015	(r47607)
+++ head/en_US.ISO8859-1/htdocs/news/status/report-2015-07-2015-09.xml	Sat Oct 17 21:40:34 2015	(r47608)
@@ -2389,4 +2389,67 @@
     </body>
   </project>
 
+  <project cat='bin'>
+    <title>mandoc and roff Toolchain</title>
+
+    <contact>
+      <person>
+	<name>
+	  <given>Baptiste</given>
+	  <common>Daroussin</common>
+	</name>
+	<email>bapt at FreeBSD.org</email>
+      </person>
+    </contact>
+
+    <links>
+      <url href="https://github.com/n-t-roff/heirloom-doctools">Heirloom
+	doctools</url>
+      <url href="http://mdocml.bsd.lv/">mandoc</url>
+    </links>
+
+    <body>
+      <p><tt>mandoc</tt> is a suite of tools for compiling
+	<tt>mdoc</tt>, the <tt>roff</tt> macro language of choice for BSD
+	manual pages.</p>
+
+      <p><tt>mandoc</tt> is the default renderer for manpages on
+	&os; head.  This quarter, the apropos(1) utility was switched to
+	use mandoc's version, which offers a new database format (in
+	sqlite) bringing more powerful, fine-grained ways to search
+	manpages.</p>
+
+      <p>While mandoc is very good for manpages, we also provide
+	lots of other documentation in plain <tt>roff</tt> format.  The
+	heirloom toolchain is being studied to replace <tt>groff</tt> in
+	base.  The heirloom nroff toolchain has multiple benefits: it has
+	very good unicode support, and  very good compatibility with
+	groff.</p>
+
+      <p>A great deal of work as been done testing the heirloom
+	nroff toolchain with all the roff documents in the base system
+	(including manpages), and upstream has been very proactive in
+	fixing reported bugs.</p>
+
+      <p>The 'soelim(1)' utility has been replaced with a
+	BSD-licensed version which is good enough to work with all available
+	roff toolchains (to ease transition).  This version
+	of the soelim(1) utility, originally written solely for &os;, is
+	now part of the mandoc tool suite.</p>
+
+      <p>The col(1) utility has been cleaned up and updated to
+	recognize both SUSv2-style escape-digit and BSD-style
+	escape-control-char sequences in the input stream (in coordination
+	with Ingo Schwarze from OpenBSD)</p>
+
+      <p>The checknr(1) utility has been cleaned up and extended to
+	support modern roff(7) macros (including synchronizing code from NetBSD
+	and the heirloom docutils version).</p>
+
+      <p>Many roff fixes were made to documentation and manpages,
+	having been discovered while testing the new toolchain.
+      </p>
+    </body>
+  </project>
+
 </report>
