Re: [Groff] new groff release soon

[Werner LEMBERG]

> OK, I did that.  It was much easier this time, probably because of
> your good work on fixing bugs, and also because I'm much more
> experienced now with MSYS.

Great!  And thanks a lot for your timely testing.

> 1. Compilation of font.cpp fails:
>
> [...]
>    I fixed this by adding
> 
>      #include "../config.h"
> 
>    to the beginning of gnulib's wctype.in.h.  This kludge works, but
>    it really isn't something I suggest as _the_ solution for this
>    problem; I don't really know enough gnulib to suggest something
>    better.

Actually, it is *the* solution right now, and now in the git
repository :-) After this release we are going to switch to an
automake build system for the whole package, with gnulib included in
the correct way – we then no longer need this hack.

> 2. Error messages in font/devpdf:
> 
>      Warning: line 28: Unable to locate font(s)
>                        URWGothicL-Demi,a010015l.pfb on the given path(s)
>      [...]
>
>    I guess these are expected, since I don't have Ghostscript
>    installed?

Yes.  Again, we should handle this in a better way as soon as we have
a new build system.

> 3. Error in doc/:
> 
> [...]
>
>      preconv: encoding system `CP1252' not supported

OK.  This essentially means that libiconv is absolutely necessary for
Windows.  This is something I hadn't thought of.

>    This is because the configure script fails to detect libiconv:
>    [...]

This seems to be a gnulib bug.  Looking into file `iconv.m4' (which is
the most recent one), I see that in `gl_iconv_AC_DEFUN' the macro
`AM_ICONV_LINK' is called before the test that checks whether `const'
is needed.  Obviously, it should be the opposite...

I'll report it upstream.

> 4.-7. [...]

I think that all those issues will be automatically vanish after the
switch to a full automake infrastructure.

> 7. Finally, I made *.cmd batch files for most Perl and shell scripts
>    installed in bin/, since otherwise those scripts will be almost
>    unusable from the native Windows shell.  Would you accept those
>    batch files for inclusion in Groff, and add them to "make install"
>    on Windows?  Most of the batch files are simple one-liners, to
>    invoke Perl on the respective script.

Yes, please send them to the list, together with changes to the
Makefile(s) if necessary.


    Werner