Subject: Re: rfc publication suggestions

From: Vernon Schryver <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 11 Mar 2001 18:24:29 -0700 (MST)

> From: Dave Crocker <[email-masked]>

> ...
> The current RFC publication process has some astonishing delays apparently 
> due to the process including a conversion of the source text to 
> nroff.  Eliminating that step, or at least automating its equivalent, could 
> only help.
> ...

I don't understand that statement.
Has the RFC editor stopped accepting nroff?
Has the old tool that generates nroff from simple ASCII been lost?

Unless things have changed in unlikely and unannounced ways, that
people either don't read RFC 2223 or refuse to submit nroff suggests
something about some of the nominal issues, including whether the
delays matter to authors and whether authors would use a better format.

No rocket science (but maybe some patience) is required to write nroff.
Thanks to groff, typesetting nroff has become free.

Vernon Schryver    [email-masked]

---

From: "Rahmat M. Samik-Ibrahim" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 15 Mar 2001 15:34:56 +0700

Rosen, Brian wrote:

> Of course a big problem is the decreasing number of
> IETF people who know nroff, and even fewer that are fluent,
> and even fewer who would, if they had a choice, choose it

> Thanks to groff, typesetting nroff has become free.

No rocket science, but perhaps archaeology.
In the early 1980s, a unix box (68ks, vaxen, et.al.) came
with a multi-volume manuals, including an nroff guide.
In this millennium, not all distros have nroff guides.

Who is still using this dino technology anyway?

regards,

-- 
Rahmat M. Samik-Ibrahim - VLSM-TJT - http://rms46.vlsm.org
- Blowfish, n (coup d'poisson) --- a secure blow job -----

---

From: Jon Crowcroft <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 15 Mar 2001 09:22:50 +0000

>>Who is still using this dino technology anyway?

i use it coz once you have a template, all wp packages are the same
effort (esp. for standards) - i also have templatex for latex and word
to do the same thing and have worked with people who use frame - i
dont understand all this nonsense - they are all equally bad at
somethings  and some better at others - wysiwyg is pretty much
a) bad for people with rsi
b) none existent in reality anyhow given the whims of rendering and
typesetting backend s/w - 

actually, groff man pages are not what you need - what you need are
MACRO manual pages - groff_ms(7) refers  you to ms(7) which is
propietary as far as i know (otherise i'd post it:-)

by the way, "dino" lasted 140M years - 70 times as long as humans so
far, and 7M times as long as IPv4.....do you have another 20 year old WP
source file you can still process apart from groff?
(rhetorical question, dont answer that:-)

 cheers

   jon

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From: "Donald E. Eastlake 3rd" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 15 Mar 2001 09:36:57 -0500

I'm even more primitive.  I don't use any nroff macros that I don't
define myself in the source file.  But once you have a template, it's
trivial.  Anyone who asks me, I send a copy of the source from some
previous miscellaneous internet-draft I've done and then they, if they
want, just like me, can simply leave the framework there are replace
the content of that draft with the draft they want.  I have no
problems editing this source with emacs, MS Word, BBEdit, or whatever,
depending what platform I'm on.

Donald

From:  Jon Crowcroft <[email-masked]>
To:  "Rahmat M. Samik-Ibrahim" <[email-masked]>
cc:  [email-masked]
In-reply-to:  Your message of "Thu, 15 Mar 2001 15:34:56 +0700." <3AB07EB0.8E8C2EB3@v
lsm.org>
Date:  Thu, 15 Mar 2001 09:22:50 +0000
Message-ID:  <[email-masked]>
X-Loop:  [email-masked]