[plug] The death of Man Pages. was: Trouble with LILO

[Paul Wilson]

> From: Rick <rick at vianet.net.au>
> 
> Q How do you know if the code is good?
> 
> A The thing does what it sets out to do.
> 

With reservations, yes.  I've come across quite a bit of code that 'works
as specified', but I consider to be badly written - identifier names at
best unclear, and sometimes blatently misleading, structure absent or
abused, comments either missing or which seem to refer to a completely
different piece of code, layout ignored. That may not stop the thing from
doing what it was advertised to do, but have pity for anyone trying to
maintain/extend it.

BTW, the code in question doesn't suffer from the above (at least, not much
 :-) ), but from what I recall, it could do a better job of handling troff,
which can be a bitch, I admit. And it certainly makes no attempt to be a
generalised troff -> HTML parser, although I did consider trying that at
the time. But the contract ran out before I got my teeth into it !!

Paul