Hi Branden, G. Branden Robinson wrote on Wed, Feb 04, 2026 at 10:06:36PM -0600:
> I wonder why Bruno Haible has so much less difficulty building on > OpenBSD than you do. If i understand correctly what Bruno is doing, i regard the wording "building on OpenBSD" as misleading. If i understand correctly, he accepts replacing significant parts of the OpenBSD C library by gnulib replacements, including parts of the OpenBSD C library that have been carefully crafted to make programs running on OpenBSD less susceptible to widespread security vulnerabilities. Groff does *not* actually need the insecure features that OpenBSD removed and that gnulib still provides, so doing it the way Bruno does it, if i understand correctly what he is doing, essentially defeats the purpose why people are running OpenBSD in the first place. As far as possible, we want software running on OpenBSD to come as close as possible to OpenBSD quality standards. Admittedly, in ports land, that is not always possible, so the OpenBSD ports tree contains plenty of dubious and sloppy software, but for a piece of software as important as groff, i consider not giving up completely on quality worthwhile, and that implies making sure that OpenBSD security features are not circumvented. > Do you not build stock groff, but only attempt a build after applying > your raft of patches to make the formatter work more like mandoc(1)? Yes, i do apply a few patches to make the formatter work more like mandoc(1), but for 1.24.0rc2, none of the patches so far touch any file outside tmac/, and none of these patches changes whether the build succeeds or in which way it fails: $ ls patches/ patch-tmac_an_tmac patch-tmac_mdoc_doc-ditroff patch-tmac_doc_tmac patch-tmac_mdoc_doc-nroff patch-tmac_man_local patch-tmac_mdoc_doc-syms patch-tmac_mdoc_doc-common patch-tmac_mdoc_local Yours, Ingo
