Re: [Groff] Tiny make patch: avoid Netpbm dependency

[Ingo Schwarze]

Hi Werner,

Werner LEMBERG wrote on Wed, Mar 12, 2014 at 10:28:43PM +0100:
> Ingo Schwarze wrote:
>> Werner Lemberg wrote:

>>> Instead, you might contribute a patch to implement a
>>> `--without-doc' configure switch that completely disables the
>>> generation of documentation files. :-)

>> Why would somebody ever want to build a piece of software without
>> the documentation belonging to it?

> To be able to build binaries from the git on platforms that don't have
> the necessary tools.  Admittedly, for groff this is probably overkill,
> since binaries for netpbm are available, but for other packages this
> can be quite useful.  For example, my ttfautohint project previously
> needed a small filter for Pandoc.  Pandoc is written in Haskell, and
> this filter had to be in Haskell, too.  Even if there was a Pandoc
> binary for Windows, I needed a complete Haskell environment to compile
> this tiny filter ??? more than 200 MByte package stuff to produce a
> 20kByte executable (if linked dynamically)...
> 
> Of course, a `--without-doc' option shouldn't affect man pages, which
> are generated by simple sed commands.

Ah, i see, thanks for the explanation (and also to Peter, who
mentioned another point i didn't see at first).

Yours,
  Ingo