Le GNU a2ps

Known bugs in GNU a2ps

Yep, sometimes there are bugs in a2ps. I'm sorry about that. Thanks to all the people who help me to track and kill those nasty little extra features.

For contributions, you'd better go and get fresh versions of them here. For a2ps itself, maybe there is the patch you're looking for right below!

New bugs are listed first.

• Cyrillic is not correctly printed.
• configure fails under BSD.
• Sripping comments does not produce good resuls.
• Link fails complaining about multiply defined symbols.
• a2ps: unknown medium `libpaper'.
• a2ps.cfg and a2ps-site.cfg are shipped.
• --truncate-line does not work.
• fixps: sed: Unrecognized command: {filename}.
• configure: test: unknown operator.
• libtool: `print' is missing (Typically DEC machines).
• Delegations are broken for compressed files.
• The test `backup.tst' failed.
• Link fails complaining about __bindtextdomain.
• User options don't work at all.
• a2ps is not Y2K compliant.
• User option don't work after a file.

Previous versions of a2ps could directly print cyrillic. Since 4.12, it no longer does, because the fonts I was distributing are actually not covered by the GPL. The package a2ps has to be completely GPL, therefore the fonts have been extracted, and put into another package: i18n-fonts-0.1.tar.gz, available in the download area.

Please, help me improve this. There are several ways: let me know of any good GPL fonts, and/or improve the ease of installation of this auxiliary package. Please understand it hurts me not to let you print in your own language: I just don't have the choice...

This is arguably a bug in ash. Run configure using bash, not ash (which is often the default /bin/sh).

This is broken by design: i is not clear when an end-of-line should be removed or not. When printing mail, it should, while in other situations it shoudn't. No fix is ready, and the problem will be adressed in the future. Sorry for the delays...

The problem is that the file lister.lo is given twice in lib/Makefile.in.

Apply the following patch in lib

--- Makefile.in.bak     Fri Jul 23 17:29:46 1999
+++ Makefile.in Fri Jul 23 17:30:22 1999
@@ -202,7 +202,7 @@
 signame$U.lo strverscmp$U.lo xmalloc$U.lo xstrdup$U.lo xstrtol$U.lo \
 message$U.lo xstrrpl$U.lo getshline$U.lo pathwalk$U.lo darray$U.lo \
 dstring$U.lo printlen$U.lo pair_ht$U.lo filtdir$U.lo str_ht$U.lo \
-title$U.lo xbackupfile$U.lo getnum$U.lo tterm$U.lo lister$U.lo \
+title$U.lo xbackupfile$U.lo getnum$U.lo tterm$U.lo \
 addext$U.lo basename$U.lo getopt1$U.lo isdir$U.lo xgetcwd$U.lo \
 xgethostname$U.lo
 LEXLIB = @LEXLIB@

This is just another incarnation of the following bug.

The files a2ps.cfg and a2ps-site.cfg are shipped, though they shouldn't. The problem is that if you configured out of the directory where you extracted the package, then the wrong files are used. When you open the package, run

rm -rf etc/*.cfg

The problem is in fact that I have inverted the reading of the choice of the user, so ask --truncate=no to truncate, and truncate=yes not to truncate. -c works correctly though.

This patch fixes the problem.

--- lib/options.c~      Thu Jan 28 17:50:52 1999
+++ lib/options.c       Wed Mar 17 15:54:19 1999
@@ -434,7 +434,8 @@
        break;

       case 151:                                /* cut lines too large */
-       job->folding = a2ps_get_boolean ("--truncate-lines", optarg);
+       job->folding = (a2ps_get_boolean ("--truncate-lines", optarg)
+               ? false : true);
        break;

       case 'C':                                /* line numbering */

fixps fails on some files when trying to fix the magic number. Download a more recent version of it.

Can't configure because it says `test: unknown operator' or so. Apply this patch to `configure':

--- configure.bak       Tue Nov 17 14:31:41 1998
+++ configure   Tue Nov 17 14:33:21 1998
@@ -6021,9 +6021,9 @@
   echo "$ac_t""no" 1>&6
 fi

-     if test x$ac_cv_path_PERL = xno; then
-        install_ogonkify=no
-     fi
+     case "$ac_cv_path_PERL" in
+       no | *missing*)  install_ogonkify=no;;
+     esac
    fi
    if test x$install_ogonkify = xyes; then
     # If we find X, set shell vars x_includes and x_libraries to the

Fixed in version 4.10.5.

You need a good shell. Probably ksh, zsh or bash, but *not* csh nor tcsh. Let be that shell, then try:

(make distclean is ever you did `configure' before)
SHELL=
export SHELL
CONFIG_SHELL=$SHELL
export CONFIG_SHELL
$SHELL ./configure --disable-shared
make SHELL=$SHELL CONFIG_SHELL=SHELL
make check
make install

It should make it.

This is because I forgot to update a file, named `sheets.map'. A fresh and updated version is available as

ftp://ftp.enst.fr/pub/unix/a2ps/sheets.map

http://www.inf.enst.fr/~demaille/ftp/a2ps/sheets.map.fixed

If a2ps was installed, then install this file in ../local/share/a2ps/sheets/. If it was not installed yet, then copy this file in a2ps-4.10.4/sheets/. The point is to replace the old bad file sheets.map.

This test tries to see if a2ps *does* preserve existing files with a mode that forbids writes. Many of you run the test as `root', who, of course, has the rights to override the file. Hence a2ps succeeds in overriding the file, and therefore the test `fails' :) So, either ignore the test, or don't run the tests as root.

The link fails complaining about __bindtextdomain and such.

Run configure with the option `--with-included-gettext'.

Fixed in version 4.10.4.

Typically under Linux, user options don't work.

Fixed in version 4.10.4g.

Well, it could have printed a date such as `100/1/1' instead of `00/1/1'.

Fixed in version 4.10.4.

User options could not be used after a file, i.e.

a2ps foo.ps -=bar

Fixed in version 4.10.4g.