[bug #59461] smoke-test_html_device.sh: make the test more independent of locale

[G. Branden Robinson]

Follow-up Comment #4, bug #59461 (project groff):

Bjarni, I don't feel your reply was responsive to my comment #2.

"This is a smoke test; it's there to make sure the HTML preprocessor and
output driver (post-grohtml) don't SEGV or fail to produce output at all.

Careful consideration of locale support in HTML documents generated by groff
should be developed in dedicated tests."

You are proposing adding stuff to the test that makes it longer without
accomplishing any marginal benefit over the existing test infrastructure.

For instance, you don't need to test if test-groff exists and is executable,
if it's not, it won't run, and _tons_ of tests will fail, alerting the
developer that something has gone badly wrong.  And a groff test suite,
properly considered, doesn't need to test anything outside the build tree (and
its corresponding source tree for non-generated files).

The audience for unit tests/regression tests is developers familiar with the
software under test.  Handholding of confused users is a distraction from the
task at hand.

If you're developing these for your own different purposes, to run against
test-groff when available and against the system groff otherwise, that's fine,
but it renders them inappropriate for incorporation into the test suite in the
source tree.

I encourage you to experiment and explore, but I would ask that you not use
Savannah to propose such materials for adoption by the project.  The mailing
list is a more appropriate forum for sharing and discussion. 

Regards,
Branden

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