Re: [Libunwind-devel] [PATCH] Fix build from scratch

[Thomas Petazzoni]

Hello,

On Tue, 02 Dec 2014 17:18:33 +0100, Olivier Fourdan wrote:

> Thing is, there should be no need to enforce timetamps to get a 
> successful build out of the box.
> 
> One of the purpose of using autoconf is to ensure that all required 
> dependencies (including tools) are available.
> 
> So either you should consider the man pages as generated files (which, 
> indeed, they are) and make latex2man required, or else make latex2man 
> optional using a configure option (that's what my proposed patch does).

Please don't make latex2man a hard requirement. In certain use cases
(such as cross-compilation tools like Buildroot), having too many hard
requirements just to generate documentation is very annoying,
especially since the documentation is not used (we target small
embedded Linux systems, so there is no documentation installed on the
target system).

So I definitely support Olivier's patch making latex2man optional, and
the idea of having an explicit --disable-documentation option. It is
definitely great to make this optional, and autoconf is designed for
making this possible.

Thanks,

Thomas
-- 
Thomas Petazzoni, CTO, Free Electrons
Embedded Linux, Kernel and Android engineering
http://free-electrons.com