Re: missing help2man

[Ralf Wildenhues]

* 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.

Cheers,
Ralf