Re: [Groff] new groff directory structure

[Eli Zaretskii]

On Tue, 31 Oct 2000, Werner LEMBERG wrote:

> > This will work, but I think it would be a good idea to have this
> > indirect invocation be a configure-time option.  Running an extra
> > program wastes system resources, which on some systems might be
> > significant.
> 
> What about exec* (resp. spawn*)?  I thought that these functions
> simply overlay the parent process

Not on DOS/Windows: spawn* don't overlay the current process (they aren't 
supposed to, by design), and exec* are implemented on several systems as 
a call to spawn* that doesn't return to the caller.

Am I wrong in assuming that this feature is not normally required by an 
average user (on all systems, not only on DOS/Windows)?  If I'm not 
wrong, why not make it an optional behavior?  I think TeX/Web2c doesn't 
support such multi-version installations, to take one example.