Re: [Mingw-msys] Man for MinGW/MSYS

[Keith M. <kei...@to...>]

Earnie Boyd wrote:
> I'd love to have you maintain the release of both groff and man from
> MinGW's file distribution when you're ready.  Let me know if this
> interests you.

Yes, Earnie.  I'd be happy to do this, on the following terms:--

1) I will be working primarily on my home box, which runs *only*
   GNU/Linux; therefore, I will provide tarballs, and will be unable to
   maintain any sort of GUI installer.  I will, however, check that all
   tarballs I provide behave as intended, on my Win2K box at work.

2) I will *not* fork the groff source.  I have already put considerable
   effort into ensuring that the FSF's canonical source will compile
   OOTB with MinGW, installing to the /usr/local tree of an MSYS
   installation, and any source tarball I provide will be a faithful
   replica of this canonical source.

3) I don't, currently, use msysDVLPR; all my work to date has been
   pitched at creating native Win32 binaries which will, nevertheless,
   run cleanly under MSYS.  Given (1), it is unlikely that I will be
   able to consider MSYS specifics.

4) As of groff-1.19.2, which is due for release in the near future, I
   will be in a position to provide installable binary and documentation
   tarballs, which can simply be unpacked into /usr/local; indeed I can
   create previews of such tarballs today, based on current groff CVS.

5) A fully functioning groff installation requires Ghostscript, along
   with a few other small dependencies, which I have satisfied from the
   GnuWin32 project; (without these, groff's HTML and PDF output formats
   will not be available).  I don't propose to manage any form of
   package distribution for these, as to do so might infringe license
   provisions.  Users can fulfil these dependencies either from
   ghostscript.com, or the GnuWin32 project on SourceForge.

6) Man *will* require a fork, as the current maintainer does not seem
   interested in supporting Win32; (I've asked him, and received a
   rather negative response).  The porting effort is non-trivial, and,
   while I've got it more-or-less working, I'm not yet satisfied that
   it's robust enough for public release.  If any other hackers out
   there are interested in helping me to expedite a release, then please
   feel free to contact me off-list; (please use my private e-mail
   address, mailto:kei...@us...).

If you're happy with this, please advise me how to proceed.

Best regards,
Keith.