URL: <https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?68220>
Summary: Building groff with autoconf 2.73 may fail due to
C23 preference
Group: GNU roff
Submitter: afh
Submitted: Wed 08 Apr 2026 07:56:49 PM UTC
Category: General
Severity: 3 - Normal
Item Group: Build/Installation
Status: None
Privacy: Public
Assigned to: None
Open/Closed: Open
Discussion Lock: Unlocked
Planned Release: None
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Follow-up Comments:
-------------------------------------------------------
Date: Wed 08 Apr 2026 07:56:49 PM UTC By: Alexis <afh>
This is more a heads-up than an actual bug report.
Nixpkgs has updated to autoconf 2.73 recently which caused build issues with
groff having been updated to version 1.24.1 not too long before in nixpkgs.
The issue seems to be that autoconf in certain environments seems to prefer
the C23 standard which "removed old-style (K&R) function definitions and
declarations", and at least src/libs/libgroff/matherr.c appears to still use
this old-style function definition, causing the following compilation error:
src/libs/libgroff/matherr.c:29:13: error: unknown type name 'exc'
29 | int matherr(exc)
| ^
src/libs/libgroff/matherr.c:29:17: error: expected ';' after top level
declarator
29 | int matherr(exc)
| ^
| ;
src/libs/libgroff/matherr.c:31:1: error: expected identifier or '('
31 | {
| ^
3 errors generated.
The autoconf release announcement states:
*** AC_PROG_CC now prefers C23 if available.
Older code may need to be updated, as C23 has removed old-style
(K&R) function definitions and declarations, now uses type-generic
functions for strchr and similar functions, and has new keywords
alignas, alignof, bool, constexpr, false, nullptr, static_assert,
thread_local, true, typeof, typeof_unqual.
-- https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/autoconf/2026-03/msg00060.html
The [https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/507771/changes fix] on the nixpkgs
side was to simply add `-std=gnu11` to `CFLAGS.
For the sake of completeness here's a link to the GitHub PR comment raising
the groff build failure:
https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/481765#issuecomment-4197261299
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