Re: GNU Parallel Bug Reports Inconsistencies in src/Makefile.am

[Ole Tange]

On Thu, Jun 12, 2014 at 7:22 PM, Michele Orru` <address@hidden> wrote:
> 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?

Because I do not want an installation to fail just because you do not
have all the build tools for documentation. E.g. pod2texi is not very
widespread and very few users use the .texi files, so they will get a
bad experience, if the build fails just because they do not have the
tools to build some documentation that they will never need.

>    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?

I would love if automake supplied --disable-documentation, so if you
can provide a patch that does this, and which does not break anything
else, I will be very interested.

> 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"?

Good call. Fixed.


/Ole