Please consider removing the conflict between groff and mandoc

[teoric]

Macports currently declares a conflict between groff and mandoc. For manpage viewing, this conflict may exist (in the sense that you can only use one program at a time for a given command), but can be avoided renaming commands. For typesetting, mandoc is evidently not an alternative. Even the current mandoc maintainer agrees it can be useful to install both groff and mandoc, see ​https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/mandoc/ (quote below):

Mandoc is neither a full replacement for groff nor intended as such. It is not even aiming to be a real typesetting system.

In addition to that, and to the aspect [that] mandoc does not support many important macro sets nor all of the low-level roff(7) language[], there are two more reasons why i need both installed in parallel all the time: (1) A small number of manual pages - about 0.25% in the wild - still require groff and do not work with mandoc. (2) Having both installed in parallel is required for routine output comparisons - mandoc even provides a convenience script to do such comparisons.

Besides, the mandoc build system provides support for renaming several of the installed files precisely to allow installation in parallel with other man(1) implementations (even though i believe that mandoc is a full replacement for man-db and similar packages - but conflicts are always a pain and can easily be avoided in this case).

[mf2k (Frank Schima)]

Note that a "request" ticket type is only for requesting a new port.

[janstary (Jan Starý)]

Yes, the mandoc build system provides ways to rename its binaries to mman etc, to not be in a name-conflict with other man viewers. See also #53902

That being said, I have explicitly removed this renaming in ​https://github.com/macports/macports-ports/pull/1183 and declared a conflict instead. While the coexistence is possible, I don't think there's much demand for it. The typical use case for having mandoc installed is to view manpages with it, calling the obvious man.

Indeed, mandoc is a manpage viewer, not a typesetter; it's also a neat little standalone application, as opposed to groff.

I believe there's more good in (mandoc's) man being called man than there is in the coexistence with groff. That might change if people need/want to have both - for compatibility comparison when writing manpages, possibly? Currently, groff does not even have a maintainer. That gives me the opposite impression.

[janstary (Jan Starý)]

Hm, the actual conflict is in these files:

• /opt/local/bin/soelim
• /opt/local/share/man/man1/soelim.1.gz
• /opt/local/share/man/man7/roff.7.gz

[janstary (Jan Starý)]

​https://github.com/macports/macports-ports/pull/1595

[neverpanic (Clemens Lang)]

[9e435697755d41b541d21bc8919aa26a7ce724f9/macports-ports]