Bug 692266

Removing the option fixes one problem, but highlight has changed significantly (and in a non-backward-compatible way) with version 3.  If you browse to a file that lacks an extension or has an extension for which highlight lacks a language file, it now produces an error and does not output any text -- despite the --force option.  For example:

$ echo foo | highlight --force -f -I -S foo
highlight: Lua error ( cannot open /usr/share/highlight/langDefs/foo.lang: No such file or directory ) in foo.lang

Older highlight handles this properly, IMO:

$ echo foo | highlight --force -f -I -S foo
highlight: Unknown source file extension "foo".
foo

The error is on stderr, which cgit's syntax highlighting script redirects to /dev/null.  But at least the output is included.

I'm open to ideas on how to properly handle this.  I'm of the opinion that this should be fixed upstream in highlight.  I'm adding the highlight maintainer to the Cc.

For reference, the cgit source highlight script from cgit-0.9:

http://hjemli.net/git/cgit/tree/filters/syntax-highlighting.sh?id=v0.9

I started working on some patches for this script, but the issue of highlight not handling missing/unknown language files is an ugly one to fix in third-party scripts.

I concur. It would be better if the problem were fixed in highlight.

The --force option appears to be fixed in highlight 3.5, from the changelog:

02.06.2011
-fixed --force option (thanks to Stefan Bühler)

So, updating the highlight package and fixing the syntax-highlighting.sh script in cgit to replace "-X" with "-O xhtml" should fix the original problem.

Since the new version of highlight supports automatic file-type detection by looking at the shebang line I believe, I tried omitting the "-S $EXTENSION" option.  It does seem to work sometimes, but I also get script execution failures occasionally, which I traced to highlight Segmentation faults when it cannot detect the file type.  Some examples, if the first line contains:

1. #!/bin/bash  --> works!
2. #!/usr/bin/perl -w  -->  Segmentation fault!
3. #!/usr/bin/perl  --> No segfault, but not highlighted.

Some types that it should know, it frequently reports:

highlight: Unknown source file extension "py".

and it doesn't add highlighting.  Other times it produces an error like:

highlight: Undefined language definition. Use --syntax option.
Segmentation fault (core dumped)

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