Re: missing help2man

[Ralf Wildenhues]

* Karl Berry wrote on Sat, Nov 29, 2008 at 11:16:37PM CET:
>     I'm still wondering about whether and how to document this in the
>     manual.  
> 
> I think one place would be the Preparing Distributions node, explaining
> that distcheck and dist will fail if `missing'-generated man pages are
> present.
> 
> And perhaps the maintainer-mode node, since that is where missing is
> discussed, explaining about the help2man "replacement" not failing.  (By
> the way, I find it odd that that node contains two subsections, instead
> of them being their own nodes.)
> 
> The only place that now talks about help2man specifically is
> distcleancheck, in an example.  That doesn't seem like the right place.
> I noticed a typo in that node, though:
>     Because we don't to force want our users to install `help2man',
> "want" should be deleted.

I still owe this adjusting of the manual; not sure about all the bits
yet either.  But let's get the bug out of the way first; the distdir
addition needed some more fixes in order to avoid false negatives.
Here is the incremental diff over the previous posted patch which I
squashed together, and pushed to both branches.

Thanks,
Ralf

diff --git a/lib/am/distdir.am b/lib/am/distdir.am
index e72d164..81d2210 100644
--- a/lib/am/distdir.am
+++ b/lib/am/distdir.am
@@ -85,13 +85,23 @@ endif %?TOPDIR_P%
 ##
 if %?INSTALL-MAN%
 if %?HAVE-MANS%
-       @list='$(MANS)'; if test -n "$$list" \
-         && grep 'ab help2man is required to generate this page' $$list 
>/dev/null; then \
-         echo "error: found man pages containing the \`missing help2man' 
replacement text:" >&2; \
-         grep -l 'ab help2man is required to generate this page' $$list | sed 
's/^/         /' >&2; \
-         echo "       to fix them, install help2man, remove and regenerate the 
man pages;" >&2; \
-         echo "       typically \`make maintainer-clean' will remove them" 
>&2; \
-         exit 1; \
+       @list='$(MANS)'; if test -n "$$list"; then \
+         list=`for p in $$list; do \
+           if test -f $$p; then d=; else d="$(srcdir)/"; fi; \
+## Note that we check existing man pages here only.  If there are man pages
+## which are not distributed, and may be generated only conditionally, then
+## we should not error out because of them.  This could be refined to take
+## into account only dist_*_MANS, but then we'd be missing out on those
+## the user distributes with EXTRA_DIST.
+           if test -f "$$d$$p"; then echo "$$d$$p"; else :; fi; done`; \
+         if test -n "$$list" && \
+           grep 'ab help2man is required to generate this page' $$list 
>/dev/null; then \
+           echo "error: found man pages containing the \`missing help2man' 
replacement text:" >&2; \
+           grep -l 'ab help2man is required to generate this page' $$list | 
sed 's/^/         /' >&2; \
+           echo "       to fix them, install help2man, remove and regenerate 
the man pages;" >&2; \
+           echo "       typically \`make maintainer-clean' will remove them" 
>&2; \
+           exit 1; \
+         else :; fi; \
        else :; fi
 endif %?HAVE-MANS%
 endif %?INSTALL-MAN%
diff --git a/tests/man4.test b/tests/man4.test
index 29b35ae..558c880 100755
--- a/tests/man4.test
+++ b/tests/man4.test
@@ -36,11 +36,15 @@
 set -e
 
 cat > Makefile.am << 'END'
-dist_man_MANS = $(srcdir)/foo.1
-dist_bin_SCRIPTS = foo
+dist_man_MANS = $(srcdir)/foo.1 bar.1
+dist_bin_SCRIPTS = foo bar
 $(srcdir)/foo.1:
        $(HELP2MAN) --output=$@ $(srcdir)/foo
-MAINTAINERCLEANFILES = $(dist_man_MANS)
+bar.1:
+       $(HELP2MAN) --output=$(srcdir)/bar.1 $(srcdir)/bar
+
+## It is a bug that we need to list $(srcdir)/bar.1 explicitly here.
+MAINTAINERCLEANFILES = $(dist_man_MANS) $(srcdir)/bar.1
 END
 
 cat >>configure.in <<'END'
@@ -59,13 +63,15 @@ while test $# -gt 0; do
 done
 END
 
+cp foo bar
+
 cat > help2man <<'END'
 #! /bin/sh
 # fake help2man script that lets `missing' think it is not installed
 exit 127
 END
 
-chmod +x foo help2man
+chmod +x foo bar help2man
 save_PATH=$PATH
 PATH=`pwd`:$PATH