Follow-up Comment #42, bug #67207 (group groff):

At 2025-07-04T11:47:43-0400, Deri James wrote:
>> In trying to address it, I blundered into a bunch of familiar land
>> mines.  A lot goes wrong because BuildFoundries.pl and gropdf.pl
>> often neglect to check for ill-formed input files or errors when
>> writing files, and even when problems are detected, these programs
>> typically just throw warnings and keep going.
>>
>> That's not what we want when building _groff_ itself.
>>
>> See bug #67268, which I'll be updating shortly.
>
> That's a little misleading.

I disagree.

> Dave's bug was not about about a perl script not validating its input,
> rather it revealed flaws in the makefile.

The Perl scripts and the (Automake-generated) Makefile have to
cooperate.  I finally discovered why the `chmod` trick you
inserted to force a "make distcheck" to ride past a file permission
failure was necessary; I've now made it unnecessary.

> You may have discovered such validation issues while stumbling about
> your minefield.

If I have to add error-checking to a Perl script to overcome a problem,
then it was the Perl script that was missing validation.  End users
could surprise those scripts just as our Makefile did.

> I say "yours" given that you are the main contributor to devpdf.am:-
>
> Ingo Schwarze           2
> Bernd Warken            4
> Deri James              9
> Werner Lemberg          17
> Bertrand Garrigues      34
> G. Branden Robinson     208
> Total   274
>
> It is unfortunate you didn't consider sharing a map of the mines you
> blundered into

You have it now!  Each mine is carefully annotated.

> rather than having a good old whinge about my work here!

I solicited your feedback multiple times.  Once, you replied, then you
didn't.

https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/groff/2025-06/msg00049.html
https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/groff/2025-06/msg00065.html

I don't much care if I sound whingy if I get a better groff out of it.



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