Portability to Mac OS X (was: Sed failure in contrib/sboxes on MacOS)

[G. Branden Robinson]

Hi, Andreas!

At 2021-10-27T00:07:22+0200, Andreas Kusalananda Kähäri wrote:
> Actually, that only makes it work with OpenBSD sed and GNU sed.  It
> still fails with
> 
>       sed: Unrecognized command: .lf 1 doc/webpage.ms
> 
> when using Plan 9 sed.  Not tested with macOS.
> 
> So it looks like the best bet is to insert a literal newline somehow,
> after the \ like the Makefile *tries* to do.  How to do that properly
> is unfortunately beyond me as I don't grock Make quoting rules very
> well.

It's a pretty rigid constraint problem.  The GNU Autoconf manual has a
canned solution that I was able to adapt easily[1].

I have groff building successfully on Mac OS X now.

However, I see more work ahead of me.

1. There are 8 test failures.  These are probably portability failures
   in my scripts.

2. I want to check out a couple of compiler warnings.

3. The linker warnings I mentioned earlier on this list may be a
   long-standing LLVM issue with no resolution in sight.[2]  I don't
   intend to act on this unless someone with relevant expertise can
   advise me.  I hope the Homebrew folks know whether this is a real
   problem and if so, how to get around it.

4. afmtodit produces a lot more warnings on recent URW fonts than it
   does on my Debian buster system.[3]

5. pnmcrop is spewing warnings[4] and possibly we're getting blank
   images in pic.html and webpage.html as a result.  If a workaround
   cannot be found, I guess this means that yet another new Autoconf
   test that warns users of broken tooling is necessary.  :/

6. Some time ago I bumped our minimum required Texinfo version to 5.0
   (for a few reasons[5]), and this is too new for stock Mac OS X
   (makeinfo 4.8).  However, it should be possible to make generated
   *.info files part of the distribution archive and thereby reduce the
   dependency load for people who _don't_ care about running "make doc"
   (which demands an entire working TeX installation).

Any guidance from readers, especially on issues 3-6, would be most
appreciated.

Regards,
Branden

[1] 
https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/groff.git/commit/?id=2b3e0a672d426253025c32bff31fffe8439c47bc
[2] https://lists.llvm.org/pipermail/llvm-dev/2015-September/090730.html
[3] For example:
    afmtodit: both Delta and uni0394 map to *D at .../afmtodit line 6441.
    afmtodit: both mu and uni03BC map to *m at .../afmtodit line 6441.
[4] pnmcrop: The image is entirely background; there is nothing to crop.
[5] 
https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/groff.git/commit/?id=986d2a5b2d908c9d129f6d486e8839c2ec24f761
    
https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/groff.git/commit/?id=d117bd8a2019ecc3ae8d41bf881b449d9e98b183
    
https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/groff.git/commit/?id=63c7249ee502f69bed9da0b76a0e33c46a47332a

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