Hi Bruno, Thanks for the testing!
At 2026-01-19T21:47:17+0100, Bruno Haible wrote:
> The INSTALL.extra file has a section "Dependencies", but it is
> incomplete:
>
> 1) It should list the 'm4' (or GNU m4 ?) program. Without 'm4'
> in $PATH, there is a build failure already at the configure
> step (seen e.g. in Debian or Manjaro 23):
>
> checking for m4... no
> checking for gm4... no
> configure: error: could not find an m4 program
Hmm, yes. This was a groff 1.23.0 change.[1] At the time I thought
"everybody has Autoconf, so everybody has m4". But of course the
premise is false; one of the purposes of Autoconf is to make a big
script in the quasi-portable shell language that is always available on
a Unix system ("configure").
I'll fix "INSTALL.extra".
> 2) It should list not only Perl, but also that specific Perl modules
> are needed.
>
> For instance, on CentOS 8-stream and CentOS Stream 9, "make check"
> fails with 1 test failure:
>
> FAIL: contrib/chem/tests/smoke-test.sh
>
> The error is "Can't locate Math/Trig.pm in @INC", see attached
> test-suite.log.
This is new. Because "chem" is a "contrib" component, and thus neither
part of "official" groff nor required at all by some installations, I'll
instead have the smoke test script use a Perl one-liner to try to import
"Math/Trig.pm", and if that fails, "SKIP" the test.
I could do the same for glilypond, which is in a similar boat named
"File::HomeDir". If it had a smoke test script--which I might as well
add now that I can guard against spurious failure.
Regards,
Branden
[1] https://cgit.git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/groff.git/tree/NEWS?h=1.23.0#n591
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