Opened 6 years ago
Last modified 6 years ago
#56313 closed enhancement
Please consider removing the conflict between groff and mandoc — at Initial Version
| Reported by: | teoric | Owned by: | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Priority: | Normal | Milestone: | |
| Component: | ports | Version: | |
| Keywords: | Cc: | ||
| Port: | groff mandoc |
Description
Macports currently declares a conflict between groff and mandoc. For manpage viewing, this conflict may exist (in the sense that you can only use one program at a time for a given command), but can be avoided renaming commands. For typesetting, mandoc is evidently not an alternative. Even the current mandoc maintainer agrees it can be useful to install both groff and mandoc, see https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/mandoc/ (quote below):
Mandoc is neither a full replacement for groff nor intended as such. It is not even aiming to be a real typesetting system.
In addition to that, and to the aspect [that] mandoc does not support many important macro sets nor all of the low-level roff(7) language[], there are two more reasons why i need both installed in parallel all the time: (1) A small number of manual pages - about 0.25% in the wild - still require groff and do not work with mandoc. (2) Having both installed in parallel is required for routine output comparisons - mandoc even provides a convenience script to do such comparisons.
Besides, the mandoc build system provides support for renaming several of the installed files precisely to allow installation in parallel with other
man(1)implementations (even though i believe that mandoc is a full replacement for man-db and similar packages - but conflicts are always a pain and can easily be avoided in this case).