Re: groff 1.24.0.rc1 dependencies

"G. Branden Robinson" <[email protected]> Mon, 19 Jan 2026 16:34:59 -0600

Newsgroups	gmane.comp.printing.groff.general
Message-ID	<20260119223459.7qrmhtg2ogkf2owb@illithid>

Hi Bruno,

Thanks for the testing!

At 2026-01-19T21:47:17+0100, Bruno Haible wrote:
> The INSTALL.extra file has a section "Dependencies", but it is
> incomplete:
> 
> 1) It should list the 'm4' (or GNU m4 ?) program. Without 'm4'
>    in $PATH, there is a build failure already at the configure
>    step (seen e.g. in Debian or Manjaro 23):
> 
>      checking for m4... no
>      checking for gm4... no
>      configure: error: could not find an m4 program

Hmm, yes.  This was a groff 1.23.0 change.[1]  At the time I thought
"everybody has Autoconf, so everybody has m4".  But of course the
premise is false; one of the purposes of Autoconf is to make a big
script in the quasi-portable shell language that is always available on
a Unix system ("configure").

I'll fix "INSTALL.extra".

> 2) It should list not only Perl, but also that specific Perl modules
>    are needed.
> 
>    For instance, on CentOS 8-stream and CentOS Stream 9, "make check"
>    fails with 1 test failure:
> 
>    FAIL: contrib/chem/tests/smoke-test.sh
> 
>    The error is "Can't locate Math/Trig.pm in @INC", see attached
>    test-suite.log.

This is new.  Because "chem" is a "contrib" component, and thus neither
part of "official" groff nor required at all by some installations, I'll
instead have the smoke test script use a Perl one-liner to try to import
"Math/Trig.pm", and if that fails, "SKIP" the test.

I could do the same for glilypond, which is in a similar boat named
"File::HomeDir".  If it had a smoke test script--which I might as well
add now that I can guard against spurious failure.

Regards,
Branden

[1] https://cgit.git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/groff.git/tree/NEWS?h=1.23.0#n591

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