Re: [PATCH 00/22] Patches to avoid use of make recursion in the 'src/' subdir

[Stefano Lattarini]

On 09/01/2012 10:08 AM, Jim Meyering wrote:
> Stefano Lattarini wrote:
>> This is a re-spin, extension and follow-up to this previous series:
>>
>>     <http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/coreutils/2012-08/msg00257.html>
>>
>> plus other follow-up fixlets and refactoring.  Thanks to Jim Meyering
>> for his testing of earlier iterations of this series, and his relentless
>> reporting of problems and errors.
> 
> Thanks for all of the work.
> However, even with all of that, "make distcheck" still fails, when
> trying to build prog.1 when the required src/prog does not yet exist.
> (it must be run with --help)
> 
> Here's a first required patch.
> 
> From cecef0d2f7ff7e4092cc991a7b8d2b0bceadf0ee Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001
> From: Jim Meyering <address@hidden>
> Date: Sat, 1 Sep 2012 10:00:26 +0200
> Subject: [PATCH] build: make each man/prog.1 depend on src/prog, not
>  src/prog.c
> 
> * man/local.mk: Creating a prog.1 man page requires running
> src/prog --help.
> List the exceptions, e.g., install.1 depends on src/ginstall
> and arch.1 depends on src/uname.
>
But this will force the users to have perl installed, since help2man
will now have to be run unconditionally after the compilation step.
I thought we wanted to avoid that (we don't for Automake, because it
already requires perl anyway).

I see three way out of here:

  - Ensure the manpages are rebuilt after all the programs have
    been built; this will require some dirty trick with timestamps
    and/or recursive make invocation.

  - Make generation and installation of manpages conditional to
    the presence of perl ("semi-graceful" degradation).

  - Just require perl unconditionally, and live happily.

Opinions?

Thanks,
  Stefano