Re: Potential enhancements to install-font.sh from https://www.schaffter.ca/mom/bin/install-font.sh

[Peter Schaffter]

On Mon, Apr 27, 2020, T. Kurt Bond wrote:
> Today I finally took the time to figure out how to install groff fonts using
> the shell script https://www.schaffter.ca/mom/bin/install-font.sh .
> 
> It was way easier than following the manual steps.
> 
> In doing so I made some changes to script that made it easier for me to
> use.  I'm sending this e-mail so folks can look at the changes and see
> if they would be useful in general.
> 
> I changed the documentation of the -l and -s options to refer to the
> prefixes /usr/local/share/groff and /usr/share/groff respectively
> because those are the directories they actually use.

Good.
 
> I added a -P option that lets you specify the prefix to use.  I often
> install software into places like /sw/versions/groff/git (so I can
> have multiple versions of software installed), which means
> that the I'd specify "-P /sw/versions/groff/git/share/groff".

Needs better documentation.

  -P  dir
      Path to the top-level groff directory if groff has been
      installed in a non-default location.

> I added a -n option that stops the source font file from
> being installed anywhere.  This is useful if you don't have
> /usr/local/share/fonts/truetype or /usr/local/share/fonts/opentype
> or /usr/local/share/fonts/type1, which, if you didn't specify -C
> and depending on the type of font file, is where the source file
> is copied to.

Okay.  Does the same thing as answering "n" to the prompt that asks
whether to copy, but might be useful for batch processing.

> I changed the script so it checks if has write access to the
> prefix directory specified, rather than checking if it is running
> as root, because if you've installed groff into a location you
> have access to as a normal user it will be writable.  And if you
> are running it as root it will also be writable.

Good.

> I also moved the check after the parsing of the command line
> options, so it uses the user specified prefix directory, whether
> that was set with -l or -s.

Good.

> Also, wouldn't this script be useful to include in the groff
> distribution?

I'm inclined to think so, however it contains non-portable bashisms
and so might not be appropriate.  The script was a quick and dirty
solution to font installation.  Something similar but more robust
and not reliant on a particular shell interpreter would be better.

-- 
Peter Schaffter
http://www.schaffter.ca