Re: [Groff] building process stuck when building groff-current using MinGW

[Keith Marshall]

On Sun, 2007-09-09 at 20:39 +0200, Werner LEMBERG wrote:
> > I removed the groff-current source directory, extracted the package,
> > and maked again. I discovered something interesting. At first make,
> > make stopped much earlier.
> 
> Indeed.  It stops with a very mysterious error not related to groff at
> all.  Is it possible that your netpbm package is broken, containing a
> bad `pnmtopng' executable?  Can you call this program successfully at
> all?

Hmm.  Yes, this looks remarkably familiar, for it's precisely this error
which I saw, and described as `broken netpbm', when I ran my trial build
on Friday.  I'd recently set up a new box with Win2K, and I'd used a
newer version of netpbm, from GnuWin32, than I'd had when I originally
wrote README.MinGW; I resolved it by reverting to the version I had
originally used, on the old box.

Sorry, I should have described this problem more explicitly, when I
observed it.  I can't remember which versions I'd used; I'll check, when
I go back to work tomorrow.

> > "make clean". Maked again, things were different - it went on,
> 
> Because the call with pnmtopng produced an (invalid) gnu.png output
> file which is not be removed by a `make clean' but by `make distclean'
> only -- gnu.png is normally part of the tarball, not to be created by
> a normal build.

In fact, it generates a zero length gnu.png, which is sufficient to let
the build continue on a second make pass; however, the generated web
page will be lacking the associated image.

Regards,
Keith.