Re: Building outside source tree directory fails

[Bob Proulx]

Hello René,

Thanks for making this bug report.  When replying please keep
address@hidden in the CC list so that others may participate in
the discussion and the answer will be in the archive for others to read.

Rene Mueller wrote:
> Building outside source tree directory fails
>
> perl help2man --name="Friendly Greeting Program" ../src/hello >hello.1
> Can't open perl script "help2man": No such file or directory
> ...
> The directive (in man/Makefile.am) obviously cannot work this way
> hello.1: ../src/hello $(HELP2MAN)
>    $(PERL) $(HELP2MAN) --name="Friendly Greeting Program" ../src/hello >$@

You are correct.  This needs to use $(srcdir) to find the program in
the source directory.  Thank you for reporting that problem.

> because  "perl help2man" acutally becomes "perl /xyz/hellobuild/man/help2man".

Can you please apply this small change to the man/Makefile.am file?
Add "$(srcdir)/" right before the $(HELP2MAN).

  $(PERL) $(srcdir)/$(HELP2MAN) --name="Friendly Greeting Program" ../src/hello 
>$@

Then edit the man/Makefile.in file and make the same change there.  If you
do it in that order then the file timestamps will be in the correct
order and will not try to rebuild the Makefile.in using automake and
you will not need automake installed.

After making those two changes please run configure again in a clean
build area.  This should solve your reported problem.  Please let us
know on this mailing list if this works for you.  We would like to
verify that this fixes the problem.  The hello maintainers (not me, I
am just helping) will make sure this is updated in the package for the
next release.

Thanks again for making that report.

Bob