Re: missing help2man

[Ralf Wildenhues]

* Karl Berry wrote on Fri, Nov 28, 2008 at 01:04:22AM CET:
>     Wl> If help2man is found, and --enable-maintainer-mode is active, simply
>     delete *all* man pages before rebuilding them.
> 
> It's not clear to me how to do that.  The man page targets are normal
> targets.  Adding the equivalent of rm -f $(man_MANS) before each one
> doesn't seem like a good idea.  There's no way to know if help2man is
> available before running missing, the way things are now.

And there is no way to know whether 'make' will even consider remaking
all man pages.  It could be the case that only some of them are out of
date in 'make's eyes.

> 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.

Exactly.

>     rw> Let 'missing' not create the output file and exit 1?  Let 'missing'
>     create the output file and exit 0, so that all man pages will
>     contain the `.ab' error message?
> 
> Yes, those are the two choices I can think of too.  Neither one is very
> appealing.  Definitely not the first.
> 
>     rw> Maybe another way to go is to exit 0, let all man pages be created,
>     but at least add a `dist' hook to ensure that the packaged man pages
>     are not the dummy ones?
> 
> What would the dist hook do?  Remove all the man pages?

Check that none of the man pages contain the error message.  If any do,
error out with a descriptive message.

We could also move such a check into 'distcheck'.  That way 'dist' could
still work if you don't have help2man, only 'distcheck' wouldn't.

Hmm.

Cheers,
Ralf