Re: [groff] 1.22.4.rc4 - Final RC before official 1.22.4

[Ingo Schwarze]

Hi Deri,

Deri wrote on Sun, Dec 09, 2018 at 12:30:14AM +0000:
> On Saturday, 8 December 2018 23:52:04 GMT Bertrand Garrigues wrote:

>> I can't judge if it would be easy or not to work around this problem (I
>> let Deri comment on that), but I agree that it's probably not worth
>> spending too much time on it.

> I'm sure there are alternative workarounds, but I'm wondering if the 
> ghostscript fonts are equally ancient, I'm not certain, but I believe at some 
> time in the past the fonts were the .pfa type and so are not binary and a 
> different code path is used in gropdf.

Ralph Corderoy suggested using

  unpack('V'

instead of 

  unpack('L<'

and that works for me on OpenBSD, Debian Jessie, Solaris 11, 10, and 9.

So if you consider that reasonable, it's OK with me if you push a change
to use 'V' rather than 'L<'.

Admittedly, the mnemonic value of 'VAX' is weaker than 'long
little-endian', so if you want to, maybe add a comment that 'V'
works on the ancient Perl 5.8.4 which is still found on Solaris 9,
while 'L<' does not, such that you can later modernize the idiom
once you decide that you no longer want to support Solaris 9.

Yours,
  Ingo