GNU Parallel Bug Reports Inconsistencies in src/Makefile.am

[Michele Orru`]

Dear parallel folks, 

I recently found myself digging into gnu parallel's source code, and
found some inconsistent behavior in src/Makefile.am that is not really
clear to me.

1. First of all, why do you ship a package with man pages, htmls, and pdfs
   if the Makefile already generates them? 
   I think this excerpt from #gnu pretty well explains in detail the problem::

< maker >  hi there! I have a question about gnu parallel. 
<https://www.gnu.org/software/parallel/>
< maker >  why they ship a package with man pages, htmls, and pdfs if the
           makefile already generates them?  
< jxself > So you don't have to?
<  *       jxself shrugs
< maker >  lol. the problem is that *.1 targets depend on target Makefile 
< maker >  which makes even that hypothesis false
< pehjota > maker: Right, so if the Makefile changes then the manual pages are 
regenerated.
< maker >  pehjota: which means "rebuild the manpages after ./configure"
< maker >  and as I'm using a different version of Pod::Man it alters a
           file present in the original package, which is not ideally good 
< maker >  pehjota: trying to be constructive, would it be fair to ask
           for removal of those files - which is not going to hurt anybody, as 
they
           are generated anyway?  
< pehjota > maker: Ah, right.  Some packages have a
          --disable-documentation configure option to disable rebuilding the
          documentation, but it seems parallel does not.  I notice the Git
          repository also has a few generated files, so the maintainer seems to
          air on the side of user convenience. 

  Would it sound reasonable for you either to provide a
  --disable-documentation option, or drop documentation from the
  package? 

2. DISTCLEANFILES variable (in src/Makefile.am) includes only *.html
files. Is there any reason for excluding the removal of also *.pdf,
*.texi, *.1 files when running "$ make clean"?  

-- 
m.