Re: Problems with .PDFPIC caused by pdfinfo

[Dave Kemper]

On 9/20/21, Keith Marshall <keith.d.marshall@ntlworld.com> wrote:
> ...and Bertrand opened a (belated) ticket:
> https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/index.php?55107

Ah, thanks for the pointer; I'd overlooked that.

> which has shown no activity since; (so even open tickets aren't immune
> to fading into obscurity).

Well, the difference is that open tickets continue to show up as
issues that are unresolved whenever anyone looks at the list in
savannah.  Mailing list posts don't lodge a similar to-do item; unless
someone happens to remember the post, or stumbles across it in the
archives, it's effectively lost.

> I would go even further ... groff should *not* be calling out to
> external tools, such as grep — much less pdfinfo — from within core
> code, in a manner which requires use of unsafe mode, *especially* when
> core code to achieve the required functionally has been awaiting
> integration for a number of years!

I don't disagree with any of that.  The ideal situation is for bug
#55107 to be resolved.

In the meantime, though, groff already *has* code calling an external
program requiring unsafe mode, and this thread is proposing only to
make this existing external call more robust, able to handle more
cases.  That seems a lower hurdle and worth doing if the proper
solution is still some time off.

Accordingly, I opened http://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?61324 for this
purpose.  I'm not certain if there was consensus in this thread around
the sed or the awk solution, so I didn't propose a specific patch, but
Heinz is welcome to if he's found something that works reliably.