Thank you for the thoughtful response, Stefano. At Mon, 19 Nov 2012 22:53:07 +0100, Stefano Lattarini wrote: > On 11/19/2012 08:55 PM, Neil T. Dantam wrote: > > > > * Don't distribute prebuilt manpages > > > That's the route that GNU coreutils has taken recently; in the unlikely > case perl is absent on the the build system, dummy man-pages are > generated.
This would also not work when cross-compiling, I think, since manpages would always be regenerated when the binaries are built and the cross-compiled binaries would not run on the build machine. > Assuming GNU make, a good solution would be to use order-only > dependencies: > > foo.1: foo.c | foo$(EXEEXT) > help2man ... > > The above ensures that foo$(EXEEXT) is built before foo.1, but doesn't > cause foo.1 to be rebuilt just because foo$(EXEEXT) has changed. Which > is exactly what we want. Thanks for the tip. That seems like exactly the right behavior and should even work with cross-compiles. Would be nice if it could be done more compatibly, but in my case, there are probably bigger OS-portability issues than a GNU make build dependency. Thanks, -ntd
