[bug #62918] Wrong GhostScript version reported during build

[Ingo Schwarze]

Follow-up Comment #2, bug #62918 (project groff):

[comment #1 comment #1:]
> I will be adding a new program, pdfmake,

Please don't.

Adding yet another program for each afterthought forgotten in the original UI
design ruins an API by adding more and more complexity and accumulating more
and more technical debt.

There is only one job: generating a PDF file from roff(7) input, so there
should only be one user-visible program doing that.  But we already have
three: groff -T pdf (which itself is a wrapper around troff(1) and
gropdf(1)!), pdfmom(1), and pdfroff(1), which really is a shame.

Considering that groff(1) already is a wrapper, the best design would clearly
be to make groff -T pdf do the right thing and get rid of the wrappers
wrapping wrappers.

But even if such a cleanup of the design and implementation would cause too
much work right now, adding *yet another* wrapper around wrappers around
wrappers sounds like an absolutely terrible idea to me.  The minimum amount of
design work to be done when adding a new feature is to make sure that it does
not ruin the quality of the already dubiously designed user interface even
further, IMHO.



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