Configuring groff hangs on OS X 10.9

[PerMildner]

port install groff hangs during configuration. Manually running configure from the build directory works.

Tried various combinations of port clean groff etc but nothing helped.

It turns out that a call to pnmtops hangs.

What did help was to change configure (in /opt/local/var/macports/build/_opt_local_var_macports_sources_rsync.macports.org_release_tarballs_ports_sysutils_groff/groff\ /work/groff-1.22.2/):

# original line:

if echo P2 2 2 255 0 1 2 0 | pnmtops -nosetpage > /dev/null 2>&1 ; then

# changed line

if echo P2 2 2 255 0 1 2 0 | $pnmtops -nosetpage > /dev/null 2>&1 ; then

Note that the configure file spends some effort to figure out the path to pnmtops (putting it in the variable with the same name) so regardless of the hanging issue the code that uses plain 'pnmtops' instead of '$pnmtops' looks suspicious. There are code a few lines down that sets pnmtops_nosetpage to a value that also ignores the path found for pnmtops but I did not change those.

I have no idea why using a full path makes a difference here. It is even possible that I misunderstood the configure script and that the if-test just quietly fails after my change, but the hang disappeared.