Ted Harding passed in 2021

[G. Branden Robinson]

Hi folks,

I have sad, but old, news to report.  Consequent to the GNU project
tidying up their maintainer records for groff (as of 7 September it
became official--the hot potato is in my lap now), some of their staff
raised questions about Ted Harding's status.

Back in 1999, Werner Lemberg and Ted Harding succeeded James Clark as
GNU's groff maintainers after a vacancy of about four years.  As I
understand it, the arrangement was that Werner would mostly handle the
programming side and Ted would handle user support.  That seems to have
worked well for many years.  But eventually their levels of
participation dropped and Bertrand Garrigues succeeded the Werner/Ted
team as sole groff maintainer in about September 2017.[1]

While Werner is still around and reliably responds on the occasions I
feel the desperate need to light the bat signal, we unfortunately
haven't heard from Ted in a long time.

And that sadly turns out to be for the worst reason.

https://groups.google.com/g/MedStats/c/9pIZjqi2nKY?pli=1

Among many other contributions, Ted wrote an excellent GNU eqn tutorial
which unfortunately doesn't seem to have ever been put under a free
software license.  Damian McGuckin has undertaken a replacement.

My thanks to Werner for finding that unofficial obituary by John
Whittington and removing the question mark.

I didn't have the honor of interacting with Ted--I was dipping my toes
in the water of the groff community in the same months he was climbing
out of the pool--but I know that many of this list's subscribers did,
and I figured people would want to know.  Computer science and software
engineering are young fields...but not as young as they once were.

Regards,
Branden

[1] https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/groff/2017-09/msg00058.html

    Apparently that status didn't percolate everywhere it should have in
    GNU's records, but enough did that Bertrand was able to function in
    the role.

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