Newsgroups: comp.text Path: utzoo!telly!eci386!jmm From: jmm@eci386.uucp (John Macdonald) Subject: Re: Price of DWB 3.1 Message-ID: <1990Dec3.181552.7469@eci386.uucp> Reply-To: jmm@eci386.UUCP (John Macdonald) Organization: Elegant Communications Inc. References: <1990Nov5.022533.29625@nixtdc.uucp> <16706@letni.UUCP> <1990Nov28.193202.19684@cbnewsl.att.com> <1990Dec1.004822.6498@ico.isc.com> Date: Mon, 3 Dec 90 18:15:52 GMT In article <1990Dec1.004822.6498@ico.isc.com> rcd@ico.isc.com (Dick Dunn) writes: |npn@cbnewsl.att.com (nils-peter.nelson) writes: | |> My own personal vision is for DWB to be something you can |> count on wherever you compute... | |The trouble with that is that the unbundling killed it. I'm with you--AT&T |should have bundled it with UNIX. But as long as it's an option, and an |expensive one (relative to the rest of the system) it's not likely that |enough people will have it that you can count on it. That's too bad. I agree with Dick here, and I consider irresponsible of AT&T to have acted in this way. DWB and its precursors have been included as part of the standard distribution for most of the history of Unix (which of course was mostly done by Bell Labs, before it became a significant commercial product). When DWB was unbundled it changed the value of Unix for the worse - it was no longer obviously correct to write documentation in troff, because suddenly there was no assurance that your target audience might be able to read it. Now AT&T has put the nail in the coffin of "Unix standard documentation". I don't expect that Posix will be able to mandate a single ubiquitous standard documentation format - I'm sure that there will be too much pressure to approve some form of TeX as well as some form of [nt]roff and it will be a long time (if ever) before you can depend upon *all* possible customers being able to use a single document format. There were definite advantages to the days when "purchasing" Unix meant leaving a tape around Bell Labs for a while and having it "accidentally overwritten" while you were off at lunch. (Of course there are other advantages to these days too, it's not all for the worse.) -- Cure the common code... | John Macdonald ...Ban Basic - Christine Linge | jmm@eci386 Brought to you by Super Global Mega Corp .com