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Re: What governs whether a project includes help2man?


From: Bob Proulx
Subject: Re: What governs whether a project includes help2man?
Date: Mon, 21 May 2007 08:50:48 -0600
User-agent: Mutt/1.5.9i

amores perros wrote:
> I was thinking, hello is meant as a canonical example, so I should copy it.

Certainly hello is meant to be a good example and so you are starting
at the right place.  I would not say canonical though because it is
really hard to only have exactly one defendable way to do things. :-)

> I did cvs checkout of the GNU hello project, ran sh autogen.sh, made
> a build directory, and ran configure and make.
> 
> My compilation failed saying that I lack a help2man binary.

I would call it a build dependency.

> gettext includes a help2man copy in its man directory, so of course I
> now am wondering what governs which projects do/should include
> help2man, and which projects do/should not include it?

Another example is the GNU coreutils that also includes a copy of the
help2man script.  By including the script it removes a build
dependency to make the project more accessable to a wider audience of
project builders who are not project developers.  Developers are
expected to know a little more and to perhaps to do a little more work
to set up the build environment in a good way to develop.  But it can
be nice to make things as simple as possible for people who are simply
trying to compile and deploy the project.

> The hello/man/Makefile.am is really *very* much shorter than
> gettext/gettext-runtime/man/Makefile.am.
> 
> Is hello meant to demonstrate how to generate a full set of
> localized man pages? (At this point I suspect it is not meant to
> demonstrate that.)

I will leave these for someone else to answer as I don't know the
answers to these myself.

Bob




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