Re: Code coverage report for groff 1.24.0pre -- thanks, gnulib!

Simon Josefsson via Gnulib discussion list <[email protected]> Sun, 18 Jan 2026 13:02:40 +0100

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

"G. Branden Robinson" <[email protected]> writes:

> Hi Collin,
>
> At 2026-01-17T10:39:05-0800, Collin Funk wrote:
>> "G. Branden Robinson" <[email protected]> writes:
>> > By happenstance I noticed the gnulib developers talking about how
>> > they had a GNUMakefile target for generating code coverage reports
>> > for you.
>> >
>> > In groff, we don't use GNUMakefiles--we try to use portable Make,
>> > and have largely succeeded.  If *BSD makes have gotten current with
>> > POSIX 2024, they may even be able to run these targets.  The most
>> > exotic thing I see is the `?=` macro definition operator.
>> 
>> The 'maintainer-makefile' module doesn't depend on GNU Make for
>> building programs. It copies a "maint.mk' file with the code coverage
>> rules, among other checks to the repository along with "GNUMakefile".
>> The "GNUMakefile" is relatively small and includes three files,
>> "Makefile", "cfg.mk", and "maint.mk"; in that order.
>> 
>> The result is that using GNU Make you will have extra targets meant
>> for maintainers. Users using another 'make' program will still be able
>> to build the programs, without the targets meant for maintainers.
>
> Right, but I want any interested person (potential groff developer) in
> possession of a release archive (or a Git checkout) to be able to run
> the targets.  It's up to them to satisfy maintainer-mode dependencies,
> but I see no reason to erect further barriers to this sort of
> investigation of the code.

It is not documented to require GNU make to use gnulib-tool etc or
maintainer-makefile -- I think -- so doesn't bootstrapping groff and
using 'maintainer-makefile' and use 'make -f maint.mk coverage' work for
non-GNU make?  What's the error?

Given that we couldn't find any workable maintained non-GNU make
implementation for a common GNU/Linux distribution, maybe we really
ought to setup a *BSD CI/CD runner that actually bootstrap build some
projects.  I have been using a OpenBSD GitLab CI/CD runner but only for
tarball builds.

I did work on updated Debian 'bmake' packaging, but it turned out the
package ships a bunch of custom /usr/share/bmake/mk-bmake/*.mk scripts
that stopped working with more recent bmake versions, and fixing those
scripts to work was beyond what I wanted to volunteer for.  I think the
package should be split up into just the actual bmake implementation,
and the *.mk scripts could go into a separate package if someone cares
about them.

/Simon

signature.asc (application/pgp-signature, 1.2 KB)