[bug #59442] [PATCH] [groff] move soelim before preconv in constructed pipeline

[Dave]

Follow-up Comment #13, bug #59442 (group groff):

[comment #12 comment #12:]
> we're already sunk, and have been for decades, by the simple
> obstacle of a space character.

Frustratingly, soelim can deal with this and raw troff can't.  From soelim(1):
"To embed a space [in the filename], write "\ " (backslash followed by a
space)."

But this works _only_ with soelim.  I've scaled down the example to remove the
potentially confounding factor of the non-ASCII characters (and to reflect
cutbacks on grocery expenditures due to inflation).

$ cat try.roff
I'll eat
.so the\ one.roff
soon.
$ cat 'the one.roff'
my sandwich
$ groff -Tascii try.roff | cat -s
troff:try.roff:2: error: an escaped ' ' is not allowed in an identifier
troff:try.roff:2: error: can't open 'the': No such file or directory
I'll eat soon.

$ groff -s -Tascii try.roff | cat -s
I'll eat my sandwich soon.


What seems nuts about that is that the first error seems like a pointless
restriction that, if lifted, would make the second error disappear.

> GNU _troff_ could have read file name arguments more in the
> fashion that it did string definitions and appendments, by
> reading until the newline.

That would work as well, but it would be nice if groff and soelim handled
filename spaces the same way.

> I am consequently inclined to either reject this ticket or
> postpone it (again) until after _groff_ 1.24.0.

Postponing is fine; the issue today is no worse than it's been for the past
however-many years, and there seems little complaint about it.  That could
just as easily argue for rejecting it, but I feel like "I want to preconv my
.so'd files" is a perfectly reasonable ask.  And if soelim comes first but the
user _doesn't_ want the .so'd files run through preconv, it's easy to say
"preconv | groff -s".  There's not a good analogue for vice versa.


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