Sendmail error ... groff ???

[someone_4]

I am trying to run the ./makesendmail command in the src dir (as instructed in Oreilly sendmail 2nd Edition. And i get this error.
what is groff ??
------------
# ./makesendmail
Configuration: os=HP-UX, rel=11.00, rbase=11, rroot=11.00, arch=8xx, sfx=
Making in obj.HP-UX.11.00.8xx
groff -Tascii -mandoc sendmail.8 > sendmail.0
sh: groff: not found.
*** Error exit code 127

[Patrick Wallek · Accepted solution]

Try this link:

http://us-support.external.hp.com/cki/bin/doc.pl/sid=e297e42a15277d58a5/screen=ckiDisplayDocument?docId=400000000202109

It lists a bunch of packages that are not standard HP stuff which includes groff. It also lists a bunch of sources to download it.

[Bill Larson]

groff is a text formatter of the same lineage as nroff and troff. In particular, the command that failed was trying to create an ASCII version of the sendmail(8) man page.

Please note that some software, such as sendmail and BIND (the DNS name server) are using the "mandoc" macro package for their man pages. This means that the HP-UX man utility will fail to properly format these man pages.

To get around this problem, you may want to also install a different "man" command, along with a text formatter (such as "groff") both of which would be needed to deal with "mandoc" formatted man pages.

Then again, you have the Sendmail book, so you shouldn't need the man pages for the new version of sendmail. So you could either: ignore this error by using another "make" target which doesn't try and format the man pages, or modify the "Makefile" to skip making the man pages.

Now, I haven't worked with sendmail for a while, but I just brought down the most recent version of sendmail. I think that you are trying to build a non-current version of sendmail. Take a look at http://www.sendmail.org and get the newest one. As long as you have an ANSI-C compiler (either HP's or gcc) you should be able to build this package with little problem.