[bug #68525] doc/webpage.html build failure

"G. Branden Robinson" <[email protected]> Tue, 14 Jul 2026 02:48:11 -0400 (EDT)

Newsgroups	gmane.comp.printing.groff.bugs
Message-ID	<[email protected]>

Follow-up Comment #1, bug #68525 (group groff):

At 2026-07-13T22:12:05-0400, Dave wrote:
> Date: Mon 13 Jul 2026 09:12:02 PM CDT By: Dave <barx>
> My July 10 groff build from then-latest git source did not run to
> completion.  It built a functional groff (with which I discovered bug
> #68510, bug #68511, and bug #68524), but the documentation part of the
> build failed as follows.
>
> GEN      font/devlj4/DESC
> GROFF    doc/webpage.html
> pre-grohtml: fatal error: 'pre-grohtml' exited with status 4; re-run
> with a different output driver to see diagnostic messages
> make[2]: *** [Makefile:19691: doc/webpage.html] Error 4

My heart always sinks when I see that in one of my builds.

> I thought that somewhere the build generated a log I could check to
> see what actual command was being run to build doc/webpage.html,

Nope, but you can likely do this (modulus your selection of build
directory):

$ make -C build V=1

> but I couldn't find it, so I'm posting here to get advice on the next
> steps I should take to find out what went wrong.

More often than not, pre-grohtml(1) fails because the troff(1) it runs
fails, and troff(1) fails because of some fatal problem that has nothing
specific to do with HTML support.

But the fact that pre-grohtml(1) always swiftly has deep cleaners on
site to sanitize the crime scene of all evidence is one of a few reasons
I want to kill that preprocessor off in the long term.

Since we have no HTML-only docs, another technique is to steer make(1)
toward building a non-HTML counterpart of the document.

$ make -C build V=1 doc/webpage.ps

Let me know if this helps, or doesn't.

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