bugGNU roff - Bugs: bug #65474, spurious "warning: unbalanced...

 
 

bug #65474: spurious "warning: unbalanced 'el' request" when formatting zic(8) from TZDB project

Submitter:  Paul Eggert <eggert>
Submitted:  Sun 17 Mar 2024 05:35:43 PM UTC
   
 
Category:  Core Severity:  2 - Minor
Item Group:  Warning/Suspicious behaviour Status:  Confirmed
Privacy:  Public Assigned to:  None
Open/Closed:  Open Planned Release:  None
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Sun 17 Mar 2024 06:29:28 PM UTC, comment #2: 

Can reproduce.

I reduced Paul's exhibit further.


$ cat EXPERIMENTS/eggert2.roff
.ie \nA .tm register A is truthy
.el .ie t .tm in typesetter mode
.el .tm in terminal mode


In terms of the `tm` terminal messages above, I get equivalent results on all of groff 1.22.3, 1.22.4, 1.23.0, and git HEAD; Heirloom Doctools troff and nroff; DWB 3.3 troff and nroff; and Seventh Edition Unix troff and nroff.

I'll share output only the last since it's the most interesting in an archeological sense.


Restricted rights: Use, duplication, or disclosure
is subject to restrictions stated in your contract with
Western Electric Company, Inc.
Thu Sep 22 22:07:57 EDT 1988

login: dmr
$ cat > eggert2.roff
.ie \nA .tm register A is truthy
.el .ie t .tm in typesetter mode
.el .tm in terminal mode
$ nroff eggert2.roff
in terminal mode
$ nroff -rA1 eggert2.roff
register A is truthy
$ troff -t -rA1 eggert2.roff
@o`register A is truthy
`````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````~@IAAAAAAAA$
$ troff -t eggert2.roff
@o`in typesetter mode
`````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````~@IAAAAAAAA$ sync
$
login:
Simulation stopped, PC: 002306 (MOV (SP)+,177776)


The same spurious diagnostic is emitted in all cases with all tested versions of groff, though the correct branch is also taken in all cases.

Setting to "Minor" severity because it is only an annoyance and does no violence to formatting.

Still, would be nice to fix because spurious diagnostics reduce confidence in others.

G. Branden Robinson <gbranden>
Group administrator
Sun 17 Mar 2024 06:15:40 PM UTC, comment #1: 
Alejandro Colomar <alx>
Sun 17 Mar 2024 05:35:43 PM UTC, original submission:  

I am following up on a bug report against the TZDB documentation that turns out to be a bug in groff that causes groff to output a false positive in a diagnostic.

I reduced the bug to the following standalone shell command:

groff -ww >/dev/null <<'EOF'
.ie \n(.g groff
.el .ie t troff
.el neither groff nor troff
EOF

On my platform (Fedora 39, with groff 1.23.0) this outputs:

troff:<standard input>:3: warning: unbalanced 'el' request

However, there's nothing unbalanced here, and this input works fine with groff and with traditional troff.

Paul Eggert <eggert>

 

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    Follow 5 latest changes.

    Date Changed by Updated Field Previous Value => Replaced by
    2024-03-17 gbranden CategoryNone Core
        Severity3 - Normal 2 - Minor
        Item GroupNone Warning/Suspicious behaviour
        StatusNone Confirmed
        Summaryfalse positive &quot;warning: unbalanced 'el' request&quot; when processing TZDB zic.8 spurious "warning: unbalanced 'el' request" when formatting zic(8) from TZDB project

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