Re: [PATCH] build: Add --disable-man-pages option

[Patrice Dumas]

On Mon, Jan 09, 2012 at 01:19:04PM -0500, Colin Walters wrote:
> There's a circular build dependency between texinfo and help2man
> now.  Allow operating system builders to manually break the cycle
> by disabling man page generation in texinfo.

I just tested that texinfo builds and installs fine without help2man 
installed.  make dist doesn't work however.  I think that it could
make sense to have a configure command line option to proceed even
if there is some missing program.  This would allow doing a make distcheck
without utilities covered by the missing script.  It could solve other
potential cycles.

However, it does not solve some other cycles, like all the autotools need
texinfo for their documentation, and texinfo needs them too.  So having
missing makeinfo not stopping the build of, for example, automake or 
autoconf is certainly more serious.  The other solution being to put
help2man and texinfo in your minimal buildroot.

If you nevertheless want to help with removing source-level cycles, 
I think that making sure that missing programs handled by missing are
really optional and that build/install/dist works fine without
them, maybe with an configure option is, in my opinion, more the way
to go.  My first guess is that all that is handled by automake.

-- 
Pat