help2man rule with non-recursive Makefile

[Peter Johansson]

Hi,

As I'm trying to convert to non-recursive Makefiles in my projects, I 
bumped into a problem that have been seen by many, so I wonder what the 
best solution is. The problem is that I have a rule to build the man 
page that looks like this:

# We would like to depend on binaries, but since svndigest.1
# is distributed it is recommended to depend on only distributed files
# (see automake manual 27.5).
# We depend on configure to catch VERSION changes, Makefile.in to
# catch rules changes, svndigest.x is an obvious dependency, and
# lib/.revision changes for every revision.
man_deps=$(top_srcdir)/configure $(srcdir)/Makefile.in \
    $(srcdir)/man/svndigest.x $(top_srcdir)/.revision


$(srcdir)/man/svndigest.1: $(man_deps)
    @$(HELP2MAN) --no-info -o $@ \
    --include $(srcdir)/man/svndigest.x \
    --version-option="--no-verbose --version" \
    $(top_builddir)/bin/svndigest$(EXEEXT)

This was never a problem because this rule was in directory 'man', which 
was traversed after 'bin' and 'bin/svndigest' existed. Converting this 
setup to a non-recursive Makefile, this assumption and no longer true, 
and in my first [naive] attempt, of course, I bumped into the problem 
that the rule was triggered before 'bin/svndigest' was built. What is 
the wisest solution for this problem? I can see that one could move the 
rule out from 'make all' or that one have different rules depending on 
building from VCS or tarball. Any thoughts?

Cheers,
Peter


--
Peter Johansson