[bug #44891] gropdf use of Compress::Zlib is not documented as a dependency

[Peter Bray]

URL:
  <http://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?44891>

                 Summary: gropdf use of Compress::Zlib is not documented as a
dependency
                 Project: GNU troff
            Submitted by: illumino
            Submitted on: Tue 21 Apr 2015 06:13:58 PM AEST
                Severity: 3 - Normal
              Item Group: Crash
                  Status: None
                 Privacy: Public
             Assigned to: None
             Open/Closed: Open
         Discussion Lock: Any
         Planned Release: None

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Details:

Greetings,

The build process of groff (address@hidden) continues over the failure
of the invocation of `gropdf' command which was started by `pdfmom'
for the building of PDF files for the "contrib/mom/examples" directory
in the source tree, and thus the following files in the installation
are missing:

  <prefix>/share/doc/groff-1.22.3/examples/mom/letter.pdf
  <prefix>/share/doc/groff-1.22.3/examples/mom/mom-pdf.pdf
  <prefix>/share/doc/groff-1.22.3/examples/mom/mon_premier_doc.pdf
  <prefix>/share/doc/groff-1.22.3/examples/mom/sample_docs.pdf
  <prefix>/share/doc/groff-1.22.3/examples/mom/typesetting.pdf

And, of course, the installed `gropdf' command will not function until
the dependency is meet.

The `m4/groff.m4' file uses "PERLVERSION=v5.6.1" in a test for the
perl version number, which succeeds on Solaris 10 Update 8, but this
version of perl does not include Compress::Zlib.

According to corelist(1) the first official release of perl to include
Compress::Zlib was 5.10.0 (as 5.9.x was a development branch)

% corelist Compress::Zlib
Compress::Zlib was first released with perl 5.009003

Multiple solutions exist, including:

  * Update the documentation and mention the requirement for the perl
    module Compress::Zlib, stating that for users of perl 5.10.0 and
    later, that this module is present in the perl core distribution.

  * Update configure infrastructure to detect that Compress::Zlib is
    missing and disable `gropdf' "compilation" and installation, and
    any dependent targets, such as the PDFs mentioned above. Simple
    would be: "perl -MCompress::Zlib -e 'exit 0;'", see below.

  * Update gropdf to conditionally load Compress::Zlib and only use it,
    when it is available.

The source of the `gropdf' command is src/devices/gropdf/gropdf.pl

Regards,
Peter Bray
Sydney, Australia

The command "gmake ./contrib/mom/examples/mon_premier_doc.pdf" on a
system without Compress::Zlib, produces the following:

LC_ALL=C GROFF_COMMAND_PREFIX= GROFF_BIN_PATH="/tmp/64-bit/groff-1.22.3"
PDFMOM_BIN_PATH="." /tmp/64-bit/groff-1.22.3/pdfmom
-F/tmp/64-bit/groff-1.22.3/font -F/tmp/64-bit/groff-1.22.3/font
-M/tmp/64-bit/groff-1.22.3/tmac -M/tmp/64-bit/groff-1.22.3/tmac
-M./contrib/mom -M./contrib/mom -k contrib/mom/examples/mon_premier_doc.mom
>contrib/mom/examples/mon_premier_doc.pdf
contrib/mom/examples/mon_premier_doc.mom:12: can't translate character code
233 to special character `'e' in transparent throughput
contrib/mom/examples/mon_premier_doc.mom:27: can't translate character code
233 to special character `'e' in transparent throughput
Undefined subroutine &Compress::Zlib::compress called at
/tmp/64-bit/groff-1.22.3/gropdf line 1897, <> line 105.

Fortunately, perl gives an exit status of 2 when it can not load a module.
Add '2>/dev/null' to silence the actual error message.

Solaris10u8% perl -MCompress::Zlib -e 'exit 0;' ; \
  [ $? -eq 2 ] && echo Missing Compress::Zlib 

Can't locate Compress/Zlib.pm in @INC (@INC contains: /pkgs/64-bit/lib/perl
/pkgs/lib/perl /usr/perl5/5.8.4/lib/i86pc-solaris-64int /usr/perl5/5.8.4/lib
/usr/perl5/site_perl/5.8.4/i86pc-solaris-64int /usr/perl5/site_perl/5.8.4
/usr/perl5/site_perl /usr/perl5/vendor_perl/5.8.4/i86pc-solaris-64int
/usr/perl5/vendor_perl/5.8.4 /usr/perl5/vendor_perl .).
BEGIN failed--compilation aborted.
Missing Compress::Zlib

Solaris11.2% perl -MCompress::Zlib -e 'exit 0;' ; \
  [ $? -eq 2 ] && echo Missing Compress::Zlib 






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