Problems installing groff 1.20.1

[Anton Shepelev]

Hello all

Here  I'd  like  to  report  the problems I had when
installing the port of groff 1.20.1 on my  computer.
I have been able to overcome them but I suspect that
something is wrong with this port because  it  did't
work out-of-the-box.

To  make  it  work I had to go through a little text
adventure, described below. If this is a bug in  the
port  then  I'd like to draw the maintainers' atten-
tion to it so they can fix it.

  1.  I had removed  the  previous  installation  of
      groff  that  came  with  Mac  OS X, and when I
      tried running groff after successful installa-
      tion  through macports was reported, I got two
      errors: groff couldn't find its FONT directory
      and its TMAC directory.

      Macports had created those directories at

        /opt/local/share/groff/1.20.1

      while  by  default  groff expects to find them
      under usr/share. To fix this problem  I  added
      these two lines to my .bash_profile:

        export GROFF_FONT_PATH=/opt/local/share/groff/1.20.1/font
        export GROFF_TMAC_PATH=/opt/local/share/groff/1.20.1/tmac

      that  tell  groff  where  to  look  for device
      descritpion files, fonts and macros.

      I think that these paths must  be  set  up  by
      macports automatically.

  2.  Groff started to work now, but the man command
      still didn't,  becuase  in  its  configuration
      file

        /private/ets/man.conf

      nroff  and troff commands were still referring
      to the old groff location at usr/bin, so I had
      to redirect them as follows:

        TROFF    /opt/local/bin/groff -Tps -mandoc
        NROFF    /opt/local/bin/groff -Tascii -man
        JNROFF   /opt/local/bin/groff -Tnippon -mandocj
        EQN      /opt/local/bin/eqn -Tps
        NEQN     /opt/local/bin/eqn -Tascii
        JNEQN    /opt/local/bin/eqn -Tnippon
        TBL      /opt/local/bin/tbl
        REFER    /opt/local/bin/refer
        PIC      /opt/local/bin/pic

  3.  MANPATH  and  MANPATH_MAP commands for the new
      %opt/local paths had to be  added  analogously
      to  the  existing ones for the /usr directory,
      so that man could see the man pages  installed
      through macports

  4.  Now  man  started  to  work but it incorrectly
      displayed terminal  control  charactes,  which
      had to be fixed by adding the -R option:

        PAGER          /usr/bin/less -iRs
        BROWSER        /usr/bin/less -iRs

Please,  let me know if someone else has encountered
similar problems and  if  they  should  be  reported
somewhere in addition to this mailing list.

Thanks in advance,
Anton