Re: groff 1.24.0.rc1 on FreeBSD 15

"G. Branden Robinson" <[email protected]> Wed, 21 Jan 2026 02:06:10 -0600

Newsgroups	gmane.comp.printing.groff.general
Message-ID	<20260121080610.gxthu2hxp26zrpdd@illithid>

Hi Bruno,

At 2026-01-20T11:50:07+0100, Bruno Haible wrote:
> On FreeBSD 15.0, a VPATH build fails. Log files are attached.
> 
> There are two problems:
> 
> 1) "make" fails:
>   ...
>   GEN      font/devpdf/DESC
>   GEN      font/devpdf/SS
> make: don't know how to make font/devpdf/symbolsl.afm. Stop
> 
> With GNU make, this would succeed. But with FreeBSD make, there is an
> error because
>   - various variables contain font/devpdf/symbolsl.afm
>   - there is a Makefile rule for ./font/devpdf/symbolsl.afm
>     but not for font/devpdf/symbolsl.afm
> 
> The fix is to remove the leading './' from that rule's target.
> It comes from '$(top_builddir)/'. But $(top_builddir) is always '.'
> since you have only one Makefile.am and it sits in the same directory
> as the configure.ac file.
> 
> When I apply the attached builddir.patch, the compilation indeed
> gets further (see make.log2).

Thanks for this!  I've tested on my main GNU/Linux system using an
out-of-tree (VPATH) build with both GNU Make and Debian's geriatric
version of BSD make ("bmake"), and for the first time ever, saw the
latter succeed, where it had been failing as recently as a few days ago.

Expect to see your patch in my next push.

> 2) There is a compilation error
[...]
> Following your report to bug-gnulib, it is fixed in gnulib, see
> <https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-gnulib/2025-12/msg00158.html>.

For some reason I had the notion I got this when updating the 2025-07
stable branch.  I guess not.

> You need to fetch this fix, either by updating to the newest gnulib
> ('master' branch) or to the 'stable-202601' branch. Cf.
> <https://www.gnu.org/software/gnulib/manual/html_node/Stable-Branches.html>.

Done in my working copy; expect to see it in my next push.

I predict that these two changes alone will substantially reduce the
proportion of failures in Nelson's buildfarm.  Anyone up for a wager? :)

Regards,
Branden

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