groff on Windows: ezwinports, MSYS2, Cygwin (was: Help wanted evaluating claimed security vulnerability in groff)

"G. Branden Robinson" <[email protected]> Fri, 29 May 2026 03:02:03 -0500

Newsgroups	gmane.comp.printing.groff.general
Message-ID	<20260529080203.u3ln6qjhqj5n3cij@illithid>

[self-follow-up]

At 2026-05-27T23:45:42-0500, G. Branden Robinson wrote:
> While I like the idea of using Bruno's "new" (relative to groff)
> support for posix_spawn() in gnulib, and he and I have mooted the
> issue before,[A] I'm a little leery of screwing with this aspect of
> the code unless I can establish a review loop with Eli Zaretskii, who
> seems to be the only contributor for many years to groff's Windows
> support, and Windows is the only non-POSIX platform for which I have
> any evidence of any groff release being circulated on the Web in the
> past decade or so.

It's _possible_ that Eli stopped maintaining his "ezwinports" port (I
hope just a _build_) of groff for native Windows[1] because MSYS2
provides an equivalent.

The MSYS2 folks have kept close track of groff releases for several
years.[2]

The reason I'm not certain is that, as I understand it (per Wikipedia),
MSYS2 provides _two_ system library layers for POSIX/GNU applications.
One is truly POSIX-like, much like Cygwin[3] (with which I'm directly
familiar, albeit out of currency for about a decade), and the other is
"native".

If anybody knows more, or runs groff in these environments, I invite you
to share your knowledge and experiences!

Regards,
Branden

[1] https://sourceforge.net/projects/ezwinports/files/
[2] https://github.com/msys2/MSYS2-packages/tree/master/groff
[3] https://cygwin.com/cgit/cygwin-packages/groff/

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