[Groff] Groff 1.17 and the DJGPP port (fwd)

[Eli Zaretskii]

I'm resending this at Werner's suggestion, since I never got any response 
from Gaius to the suggestions in my original message.

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Thu, 10 May 2001 17:11:38 +0300 (IDT)
From: Eli Zaretskii <address@hidden>
To: Werner Lemberg <address@hidden>
Cc: Gaius Mulley <address@hidden>
Subject: Groff 1.17 and the DJGPP port

I see that Groff 1.17 was recently released.  Congratulations, and thanks 
for maintaining it!

I tried to build a DJGPP-compiled version, but found out that the new 
grohtml device needs some work.  It uses fork/exec which will not work in 
the DJGPP port.

I'm currently thinking how to solve this, and I'd like to ask you up 
front about the solution I'm considering.  What I'd like to do is rewrite 
the two functions which use fork/exec to use popen instead.  I believe 
that any decent Unix implementation of popen uses fork/exec internally, 
so the only disadvantage of this for Posix systems would be some 
additional overhead due to forking the shell.  Is this acceptable?

(Groff elsewhere tests for popen being available, but are there platforms 
supported by Grof which don't have it?)

If using popen universally is not acceptable, I will add a special 
branch, #ifdef'ed with something like CANT_FORK, which will either
use the popen alternative, or invoke the subprocess directly via
spawn().

Please advise.