Re: [Groff] Re: grohtml patches

[Keith Marshall]

On Monday 24 November 2003 1:57 pm, Gaius Mulley wrote:
> Werner LEMBERG <address@hidden> writes:
> > what do you think about adding keywords to the grohtml DESC file to
> > control the name of gs?  As you know, the binary name of gs depends
> > on the platform; there are at least four possibilities according to
> > the gs man page: gs, gswin32c, gswin32, and gsos2.  The configure
> > script could then contain some code to automatically adjust that.
>
> . done, ./configure tries to detect where gs lives and updates devhtml/DESC
>   appropriately. It could be improved by introducing a --withgs=/usr/bin/gs
>   option though..

Hi Gaius,

I do not mean to be rude, or in any way negative about this, but does 
autoconf convention not dictate that this should be ...

        --with-gs=/path/to/gs/executable

...?  Perhaps this is what you intended, in any case.

I rather think that it may be a requirement to provide support for such an 
option.  Configure can only deduce the correct path for the gs executable in 
respect of the build host.  From monitoring the MinGW-Users mailing list, I 
observe that a significant number of subscribers are actually running the 
MinGW port of GCC on GNU/Linux, as a cross-compiler, to build Win32 binaries. 
When such users run configure, will it not most likely infer that the gs 
executable is /usr/bin/gs,  (or whatever its installation path is on the 
GNU/Linux host)?  They, therefore, *need* a mechanism to override this, to 
identify the appropriate location on the Win32 target, which is likely to 
have something like 'C:\Program Files\GhostScript\8.11\bin\gswin32c.exe', if 
AFPL GhostScript is installed in its default location.

BTW, I originally wrote in README.MinGW, that the gswin32c.exe needs to be 
copied from this default location, to some directory in the PATH, and renamed 
as gs.exe.  I know that the intention of this DESC modification is to allow 
us to retain the default gswin32c.exe name;  presumably, if we can also get 
the --with-gs option working in configure, then the requirement to copy the 
executable into the PATH will also disappear.

Best regards,
Keith.