I have compiled groff-current on MacOS X 10.4.3 and stepped over the
following bug
makeinfo (GNU texinfo) 4.8
My texinfo reports the same.
configure does not parse the version string correctly and complains
that version is too old (instead of admitting the error).
This is interesting, since it looks like a problem with sed. You are
using BSD sed, right? Please show us what the following expression
yields:
makeinfo --version | sed 's/^.* \([^ ]\+\)$/\1/;1q'
with GNU sed, I get `4.8'. Then I have
echo 4.8 | sed 's/^\([0-9]*\).*$/\1/'
==> 4
echo 4.8 | sed 's/^[^.]\+\(.*\)$/\1/'
==> .8
echo .8 | sed 's/\.\([0-9]*\).*$/\1/'
==> 8
The various sed expressions are there to handle various possible
version info strings like `4', `4.8', or `4.8.1'.
Before applying your patch I want to know the reason for the failure,
probably reporting it to both the BSD sed and autoconf people. Maybe
my original regexps are non-POSIX...