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

[John Gardner]

>
> https://mandoc.bsd.lv/texi2mdoc/


I was thinking of ms(7) more than manual pages, actually. Think single-page
HTML output.

mdoc(7) is too restrictive and specialised to lend itself well to the
various applications Texinfo manuals are used for.

(Anyway, I was just spitballing. I want an excuse to separate Groff from
the TeX world as much as humanly possible…)


On Fri, 29 Oct 2021 at 04:27, John Gardner <gardnerjohng@gmail.com> wrote:

> 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
>>
>