Re: discrepant groff configurations

[Colin Watson]

On Fri, Mar 27, 2020 at 01:28:43PM +0000, Ralph Corderoy wrote:
> (Actually, the existence of /usr/share/groff/current seems a bit odd.
> Most packages don't have a symbolic link to support multiple installed
> versions and users that want multiple versions of a program installed
> can use GNU Stow or similar to maintain the symlinks if their package
> manager doesn't provide it.)

Really, the weird thing is not so much the existence of the current
symlink, as the fact that the directories under $(dataprogramdir) are
versioned.  The current symlink is an attempt to cope with that so that
other bits of software that for some reason need to look at files in
tmac/ can do so without having to keep track of the version number; but
it's quite possible that it would have been better to abolish the
versioned directories.

Anyway, groff's build system was more or less completely rewritten
between 1.22.3 and 1.22.4 (Bertrand's automake conversion), so that will
certainly confound any attempts to compare different distributions if
you aren't comparing like version for like.

-- 
Colin Watson                                       [address@hidden]