Here's my e-mail sent to gnu.org.
Werner
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Folks,
we need a new maintainer for GNU troff. While I still apply critical
patches here and there, I no longer have the impetus to do active
development of the package.
Note that Ted Harding, my co-maintainer, doesn't do any coding; he is
rather the helpful soul who takes care of user requests on the mailing
list (and I'm very glad that he does so).
The software package itself is in a rather good state, I think; it
compiles just fine on most (if not all) platforms, as far as I know.
Here's a short list of the most necessary improvements which quickly
came to my mind.
meta-level
----------
. Move the groff CVS repository to a modern DVCS (I prefer git).
. Update infrastructure to use gnulib. Right now, it has a hybrid
approach to use gnulib for a single module only, which is a waste
of resources and a pain to maintain.
. Make groff use automake.
technical
---------
. Implement TeX's paragraph formatting or something similar – I
consider groff's line-oriented paragraph formatting as its weakest
point. See heirloom troff for an example how this could be
implemented.
http://heirloom.sourceforge.net/doctools.html
. Update to today's font world. What groff currently supports
natively (PostScript Type 1) is out of date since 15 years.
Again, heirloom troff has support for this.
. Apply zillions of small bug fixes sent to the groff mailing list.
. Better support of Unicode.
Werner
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