Re: What governs whether a project includes help2man?

[Karl Berry]

Hi,

Thanks for writing.  Nice to see someone using hello for its intended
purpose :).

To answer your real question first:

    Is hello meant to demonstrate how to generate a full set of
    localized man pages?

Unfortunately not.  I have no knowledge of localized man pages.  I'd be
more than happy for hello to serve as an example if we can figure it
out, but I don't know what the answer is myself :).

    I've seen gettext/gettext-runtime/man/Makefile.am, but it
    is really very complicated

Hmm, I don't see anything there to support localized man pages, either.
It mostly seems complicated because there are a lot of man pages in
gettext, and the gettext author uses a two-step generation progress.
Not that I've ever tried to follow it in detail.

I will send a separate message with more about this.


Meanwhile, you also mentioned:

    My compilation failed saying that I lack a help2man binary.

You can download it from http://www.gnu.org/software/help2man.
(As stated in the README.)  It is very small, and simple to install.

    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?

Nothing but the predilection of the package maintainer.

In my case (as the current hello maintainer), I did not want to include
help2man in the *development sources*, any more than I want to include
makeinfo, gettext, automake, or autoconf.

I think there is a useful distinction between the dev sources and a
release.  In an actual release tarball, certainly none of the above
programs should be necessary to compile and install the program.  And if
you download the latest release from ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/hello, I
don't think you will need them.

However, for development, I don't think it's unreasonable to ask fellow
programmers to download the latest release of these packages and install
them.  After all, as programmers, we're supposed to enjoy doing stuff
like that :).

(I won't go into why I feel the Gnulib files are best treated differently.)

Best,
Karl