Re: missing help2man

[Ralf Wildenhues]

Hello Roumen,

let's keep the others in Cc:, I don't think they all read bug-automake.

* Roumen Petrov wrote on Fri, Nov 28, 2008 at 09:48:13PM CET:
> Ralf Wildenhues wrote:
>> * Werner LEMBERG wrote on Fri, Nov 28, 2008 at 07:18:46AM CET:
>>>> Anyway, maintainer-mode isn't very interesting; few packages use it.
>>>> The more important question is what to do in non-maintainer mode,
>>>> where (it seems to me) exactly the same problem will occur.  For
>>>> instance, in GNU Hello (well, except that has only one man page) or
>>>> coreutils.
>>> Well, if `make' called by the user has to generate man pages with the
>>> use of help2man, there *must* be a configure check for it.  I don't
>>> see a problem.
>>
>> The point is that this problem should only ever show up when you use
>> VCS sources to build from, never from a release tarball: the tarball
>> should always contain a copy of the man pages, and not need to rebuild
>> them.  Thus it would be over-reaching for example, to require that
>> help2man is present, when configure is run from an extracted tarball.
>
> May be a check for help2man in bootstrap is enough ?

That is a valid possibility for those developers that want to require
that VCS users have help2man installed.  However, Automake does not
control the bootstrap scripts of packages using Automake, and rightly so.

So yes, we could recommend to do this, but it would be a limitation from
the intended semantics: that also users who do not have help2man
installed, can use a VCS checkout; they just don't get the man pages in
this case.  For that, they'd need to use a tarball.

Cheers,
Ralf