Re: Portability to Mac OS X (was: Sed failure in contrib/sboxes on MacOS)

[John Gardner]

In lieu of escaped newlines and awkward sed(1) formatting, you can use the
following line to insert an empty line:

/^Before$/ { N; s/\n/&&/; }

Note that BSD sed(1) is picky about braces and semicolons.

 I have groff building successfully on Mac OS X now.
>

I recently upgraded to macOS 12.0.1 (Monterey), though I've not recompiled
Groff yet. Gonna do that now and report on any new issues.

However, it should be possible to make generated *.info files part of
> the distribution archive and thereby reduce the dependency load for
> people who _don't_ care about running "make doc" (which demands an
> entire working TeX installation).
>

Even better: a preprocessor to convert Texinfo markup to Roff source
(possibly targeting a macro package). I've said it before, and I'll said it
again: Groff needs TeX about as badly as it needs an Instagram page.

texi2roff(1) anyone? (I imagine it'd be fun to write in Perl…)

On Wed, 27 Oct 2021 at 16:10, G. Branden Robinson <
g.branden.robinson@gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi, Andreas!
>
> At 2021-10-27T00:07:22+0200, Andreas Kusalananda Kähäri wrote:
> > Actually, that only makes it work with OpenBSD sed and GNU sed.  It
> > still fails with
> >
> >       sed: Unrecognized command: .lf 1 doc/webpage.ms
> >
> > when using Plan 9 sed.  Not tested with macOS.
> >
> > So it looks like the best bet is to insert a literal newline somehow,
> > after the \ like the Makefile *tries* to do.  How to do that properly
> > is unfortunately beyond me as I don't grock Make quoting rules very
> > well.
>
> It's a pretty rigid constraint problem.  The GNU Autoconf manual has a
> canned solution that I was able to adapt easily[1].
>
> I have groff building successfully on Mac OS X now.
>
> However, I see more work ahead of me.
>
> 1. There are 8 test failures.  These are probably portability failures
>    in my scripts.
>
> 2. I want to check out a couple of compiler warnings.
>
> 3. The linker warnings I mentioned earlier on this list may be a
>    long-standing LLVM issue with no resolution in sight.[2]  I don't
>    intend to act on this unless someone with relevant expertise can
>    advise me.  I hope the Homebrew folks know whether this is a real
>    problem and if so, how to get around it.
>
> 4. afmtodit produces a lot more warnings on recent URW fonts than it
>    does on my Debian buster system.[3]
>
> 5. pnmcrop is spewing warnings[4] and possibly we're getting blank
>    images in pic.html and webpage.html as a result.  If a workaround
>    cannot be found, I guess this means that yet another new Autoconf
>    test that warns users of broken tooling is necessary.  :/
>
> 6. Some time ago I bumped our minimum required Texinfo version to 5.0
>    (for a few reasons[5]), and this is too new for stock Mac OS X
>    (makeinfo 4.8).  However, it should be possible to make generated
>    *.info files part of the distribution archive and thereby reduce the
>    dependency load for people who _don't_ care about running "make doc"
>    (which demands an entire working TeX installation).
>
> Any guidance from readers, especially on issues 3-6, would be most
> appreciated.
>
> Regards,
> Branden
>
> [1]
> https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/groff.git/commit/?id=2b3e0a672d426253025c32bff31fffe8439c47bc
> [2] https://lists.llvm.org/pipermail/llvm-dev/2015-September/090730.html
> [3] For example:
>     afmtodit: both Delta and uni0394 map to *D at .../afmtodit line 6441.
>     afmtodit: both mu and uni03BC map to *m at .../afmtodit line 6441.
> [4] pnmcrop: The image is entirely background; there is nothing to crop.
> [5]
> https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/groff.git/commit/?id=986d2a5b2d908c9d129f6d486e8839c2ec24f761
>
> https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/groff.git/commit/?id=d117bd8a2019ecc3ae8d41bf881b449d9e98b183
>
> https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/groff.git/commit/?id=63c7249ee502f69bed9da0b76a0e33c46a47332a
>