Re: $(srcdir) in man pages and other targets

[Patrice Dumas]

On Tue, Nov 20, 2012 at 11:03:57PM +0000, Karl Berry wrote:
>     I am currently checking portability of bootstraping the cvs on free
>     platforms
> 
> In general, bootstrapping CVS is a very different question from
> installing the release.  It is not a goal of mine to support
> bootstrapping Texinfo CVS in an arbitrary environment.  I think that
> would be a tremendous amount of pain for no discernible benefit.

At the same time it allows to check for differences in setup that may be
relevant for the diversity of people wanting to bootstrap from CVS.  My
checks on this BSD showed 2 issues that are of more general relevance.
After those 2 changes, it bootstraps.

>     So, is there a reason why you used $(srcdir)/ in the rule?
> 
> Good question.  I suspect I more or less didn't know what I was doing,
> thinking that I had to use $(srcdir) because I wanted to distribute
> those files.  Or maybe I was trying to avoid requiring help2man for
> bootstrappers.  Or wrongly thinking of them as related to BUILT_SOURCES
> somehow.  As you can tell, I don't really remember.  If you want to
> experiment with removing the $(srcdir), feel free.  I do (think I) agree
> with your argument in general.

Ok.  What is important is to check that out of source build of a release
do not require help2man nor leads to redoing the Makefiles, I'll try to
setup such testing.

-- 
Pat