Re: [Groff] Re: DESC question

[Keith MARSHALL]

Alejandro López-Valencia wrote:
> Ersin Akinci wrote:
>> Thanks for all your suggestions and help!  I did manage to find my
>> "problem", though.  Just for the record (for anyone else who might
>> have this problem), compiling statically will yield the "No DESC"
>> error.  You need to compile linked to shared libraries.  Alejandro
>> made the point that the DESC file is included, which makes sense,
>> since I'm not getting those errors anymore.
>
> Do notice that that was Keth Marshall...

Well, the correct spelling of my Christian name is `Keith', but
I'll forgive the typo :-)

> It seems strange to me that a statically linked binary would not
> find a compiled in path. What Linux/Unix version do you use and
> what compiler/version? That sounds as either an bug with
> optimization or the runtime library.

AFAIK, groff should work either with static or dynamic linking.
More likely, when you built the dynamically linked version, Ersin,
you then got everything in the proper place, for groff to find its
DESC file at runtime.  Or perhaps, as Alejo suggests, you have a
buggy static library, or an optimisation problem.  Or, another
possibility is that, when you configured for static linking, some
path component, or the path separator was misidentified, resulting
in an invalid path compiled into the binary.

For the record, I have never attempted to force either static or
dynamic linking -- I simply use:

   <srcdir>/configure --prefix=<prefix> PAGE=a4
   make
   su -c 'make install'

and leave configure to sort out the dependencies.

I *have* seen the `can't find DESC file' message in the past.
It was either a result of trying to run groff without completing
the `make install' step, while neglecting to explicitly specify
the  GROFF_FONT_PATH, or, when I first built on MS-Windows using
the MSYS/MinGW tool chain, and before I realised that `<prefix>'
had to be explicitly specified using MS-Windows path semantics.
(The MSYS emulated `/usr/local', which configure uses by default,
is not valid at runtime, for the groff binary running natively
under MS-Windows;  building with this default <prefix>, or
<prefix> specified with POSIX semantics, results in an
invalid path, compiled into the binary).

Regards,
Keith.