Am Montag, 20. September 2021, 21:39:49 CEST schrieb Keith Marshall: > On 20/09/2021 19:22, Dave Kemper wrote: > > Hi Heinz-Jürgen, > > > > Thanks for debugging and submitting a fix for this problem! > > Except that it's not really the most appropriate solution; that was > proposed four years ago... > > > In general, when proposing changes to the groff code base, it's best > > to open a bug report ... > > ...and Bertrand opened a (belated) ticket: > https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/index.php?55107 > > which has shown no activity since; (so even open tickets aren't immune > to fading into obscurity). > > > Regarding the specific change you've proposed, there may be some > > resistance to using a grep option that's not part of the POSIX > > standard for the command. I'm not sure how widely implemented -a is, > > or what equivalent solution might be more portable. > > I would go even further ... groff should *not* be calling out to > external tools, such as grep — much less pdfinfo — from within core > code, in a manner which requires use of unsafe mode, *especially* when > core code to achieve the required functionally has been awaiting > integration for a number of years!
For me too it would be a better solution to not calling external tools, even that's part of the linux/unix philosophy. As you found out, this small problem does exist for years already. I don't remember exactly, but I looked already at the pdfinfo code, but was not able to correct it. It seems to be only the pdfinfo used in OpenSuse. Posix grep https://www.unix.com/man-page/posix/1P/grep/ does not know the -a or --text option. Regards Heinz
