Re: groff 1.23.0.rc4 on Solaris 11 OpenIndiana

[G. Branden Robinson]

At 2023-04-20T18:14:04-0500, Dave Kemper wrote:
> On 4/19/23, G. Branden Robinson <g.branden.robinson@gmail.com> wrote:
> > We still won't be able to support Solaris sed, in either its
> > /usr/bin or /usr/xpg4/bin forms.  Unless we change the way GNU troff
> > processes `sy` arguments, we will forever need a non-standard
> > extension to sed(1) to pull [off] this sort of tomfoolery.
> 
> It depends on how tomfoolish you want to get.  It should be possible
> to get the same results -- at the cost of either an additional temp
> file, or an additional call to "pdfinfo" -- by invoking sed twice,
> once to extract each parameter.

Yes, this and a couple of other tricks occurred to me subsequently.

1.  A sed trick, to copy the pattern space into the hold space, do one
    transformation, then exchange them and do the other.  Two
    single-line replacements instead of one double-line replacement.
    I don't know the precise details of thus sort of stunt--I'm not an
    advanced sed programmer--but I'm pretty confident it's possible.

2.  A groff trick, using its \R register extension, to initialize both
    registers on one control line.  In this case it would be a
    single-line replacement again, with something like

    .nop \R'pdfpic*width \1' \R'pdfpic*height \2'

    or something like that, ignoring backslash-quoting issues.

So my claim of "forever" was overstated.

On the other hand, both will be harder to understand; the second relies
upon a GNU troff extension; and my engineering instincts desire a
general solution to the problem, hence
<https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?64071>.

> I don't see much need to worry about Solaris 10 or old macOSes.  And
> even Solaris 11 isn't urgent, since this pipeline hasn't worked there
> since it was introduced.  But if the need for two lines in
> pdfpic*temporary-file, which can't be output portably by a single sed
> invocation, is the only tomfoolery blocking Solaris 11, it seems like
> fixing that gives you the other two for free.

Right.  It's tempting, and would improve the groff story in general on
those platforms and our PDF support story in particular.

I have a cleanup of the existing logic on my personal branch
(branden-2023-04-20), but nothing intended for 1.23.0 yet.  If Bertrand
sees something that he feels should really go into the next RC, I'm
inclined to oblige him.  :)

Regards,
Branden

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