Re: [Nmh-workers] nmh User's Manual?

[Paul Vixie]

On 2/29/2012 7:26 PM, Ken Hornstein wrote:
> It's got to be run through the build system to get rid of all the
> @BEGIN@/@END@ pairs (and I'm not even sure what definitions we should
> use to do that). Someone has to do that grunt work ... and I haven't
> heard anyone volunteer for that just yet.

all large troff projects involve off-brand preprocessors. for example
here's a snippet from "Sendmail: Theory and Practice":

Often a user will be known by some set of names other than (or in addition
to) her login name.  Sendmail's _EX(aliases) database is a way to funnel
mail from all of these names into a single mailbox.  Likewise, a user will
probably read her mail on some particular host, but it is inconvenient for
other users to have to know which host that is, since a user might move her
mailbox to a different host, or the host's name might be difficult to spell
or to remember.  The _EX(aliases) database can direct a user's mail toward
her _IT(mail host) no matter which host in the local domain first receives
any given message.  This is particularly useful because it allows a user to
appear to be reachable at the border gateway or on the main mail hub.

originally, _EX and _IT and about a half dozen others were handled by
m4. by the end, it was a perl script, which handled these expansions but
also handled tags and refs for the index.

i'd propose to keep the format as much as possible but to collapse down
the contraption they use to turn it into troff. and i'd also propose
that we feel free to use groff extensions; nobody's going to build this
on a DWB system again.