Re: [Groff] Re: groff build/release engineering

[jim]

>>>>> "Keith" == Keith Marshall <address@hidden> writes:

    Keith> Jim Reid's continuing rant is becoming quite irritating
    Keith> now, especially since his principal contention is actually
    Keith> refuted by evidence present in his own original posting.
    Keith> He complains of a hard coded requirement for /bin/bash, in
    Keith> the groff Makefile, yet the failing command in his is make
    Keith> error report clearly shows that the shell in use was
    Keith> /usr/contrib/bin/bash.

That's because I had to edit the Makefile to kludge around this. Next
time, please be sure of your facts. The first attempt with make blew
up with a "/bin/bash not found" error. Which I've never complained
about. As I'm sure you realise, debugging a GNU autoconfigure script
is very painful, so I did a Q&D hack to in the hope of getting groff
installed and then go back later when I had nothing better to do with
my time and debug this /bin/bash nonsense.

    Keith> The actual cause of this failure had nothing whatsoever to
    Keith> do with the choice of bash as the make shell

I was making a wider point that has nothing to do with the build
problems I am experiencing.

I've just run configure on a freshly-unpacked 1.19.1 source tree:

gromit% grep -ir /bin/bash .
./Makefile:SHELL=/bin/bash
./config.log:SHELL='/bin/bash'
./config.status:#! /bin/bash
./config.status:SHELL=${CONFIG_SHELL-/bin/bash}
./config.status:  echo "running /bin/bash ./configure "  
$ac_configure_extra_args " --no-create --no-recursion" >&6
./config.status:  exec /bin/bash ./configure  $ac_configure_extra_args 
--no-create --no-recursion
./config.status:s,@SHELL@,/bin/bash,;t t

configure has somehow decided to hard-wire /bin/bash into the Makefile
despite the facts that (a) there is no /bin/bash; (b) /usr/contrib/bin
is in the search path and bash lives there; (c) $SHELL appears only to
get used by make to invoke your Bourne shell script shdeps.sh even
though it could just run shdeps.sh directly. Creating this sort of
unnecessary dependency -- even if the pathname was right! -- is bad
release engineering. I had hoped the groff developers would want to
know about this and fix it. Oh well. Since nobody else cares, I'll
shut up now and just hope something better is put in place for the
next release.

    Keith> Jim's remaining problem also has absolutely nothing to do
    Keith> with the choice of shell -- rather, it would seem that,
    Keith> having compiled and built all the groff binaries, the DESC
    Keith> file for the postscript output device cannot be located by
    Keith> the troff binary.  I don't know why this should be, but it
    Keith> certainly isn't related to any GNU preference for bash as
    Keith> the shell, so why does he keep banging on about it?

I'd hardly consider making 1-2 postings about that problem "banging on
about it". And I never even suggested that this might be related to
configure's obsession with a non-existent /bin/bash. The only response
was from you -- for which I'm grateful -- didn't provide anything I'd
hadn't already tried and checked. Nobody's given any pointers to help
me troubleshoot what DESC file groff is unable to find. The arguments
to groff look OK and the files exist in the places groff is told to
look for them.

It used to be a no-brainer to compile and install groff. Sigh.