Re: [Groff] groff 1.19.1 compile/installation failure

[Larry Kollar]

> When I try to compile 1.19.1 on a BSD/OS platform, make
> dies:
>
> ...
>
> Even though the compilation succeeds with gnu make, the
> build doesn't. It now fails:

1.19.1 compiles OK under MacOS X (10.2/Jaguar), but on the
CVS version, the documentation build dies at:

makeinfo -I . ./groff.texinfo
./groff.texinfo:435: Unknown command `tie'.
./groff.texinfo:435: Misplaced {.
./groff.texinfo:435: Misplaced }.
[repeated many times]
Too many errors! Gave up.
make[2]: *** [groff] Error 1
make[1]: *** [doc] Error 2
make: *** [all] Error 2
% makeinfo --version
makeinfo (GNU texinfo) 4.2
etc....

This also happens when attempting to build HTML with
"makeinfo --html groff.texinfo" in both 1.19.1 and CVS.

> I think someone has seen great virtue in needlessly
> complicating the compilation and installation of groff.
> Or has made that too Linux specific.

I'd say more GNU-specific than Linux-specific -- at least
in this case, it might be more precise to heed RMS's advice
about distinguishing between them. For instance, OSX has
BSD ancestry but includes a large complement of GNU tools,
so compiling groff itself is no trouble on OSX (at least
after you've done "./configure CXX=g++2" to get around a
GCC bug). I've never really delved deeply enough into
makefiles to know what differences exist between GNU make &
other make versions.

I suspect that making the makefiles work with non-GNU makes
would be a chore since they're built with configure (aka
GNU autoconf). But requiring bash, and requiring it to be
in /bin, is probably something that could be fixed.

    Larry