URL: <https://savannah.gnu.org/support/?111391>
Summary: Cannot regenerate manpages on system where PERL is
not a single command
Group: Autoconf
Submitter: rossburton
Submitted: Wed 04 Mar 2026 03:53:13 PM UTC
Priority: 5 - Unprioritized
Severity: 3 - Normal
Status: None
Privacy: Public
Assigned to: None
Originator Email:
Open/Closed: Open
Discussion Lock: Unlocked
Operating System: None
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Follow-up Comments:
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Date: Wed 04 Mar 2026 03:53:13 PM UTC By: Ross Burton <rossburton>
tl;dr: autoconf should have a distinction between "the perl I put in the
hashbang of autoconf" and "the perl I can run at build time", because they
might not be the same thing.
Specifically, I'm cross-compiling a SDK with autoconf in so don't know where
perl is on the target. Thus I set PERL="/usr/bin/env perl" and autoconf
doesn't need to know exactly where perl is on the host.
But this now breaks manpage regeneration if that is needed (say, I patched
autoreconf.1 with --exclude patches).
help2man: can't get `--help' info from autoreconf.w
Pulling out a reproducer and then using --no-discard-stderr:
$ env PERL='/usr/bin/env perl' PATH="../sources/autoconf-2.72.90/man:$PATH"
PACKAGE_NAME="GNU Autoconf" VERSION='2.72.90' RELEASE_YEAR="2026"
top_srcdir="../sources/autoconf-2.72.90"
channeldefs_pm="lib/Autom4te/ChannelDefs.pm" help2man --no-discard-stderr
autoreconf.w
.\" DO NOT MODIFY THIS FILE! It was generated by help2man 1.49.3.
.TH AUTORECONF.W: "1" "March 2026" "autoreconf.w: 3: exec: /usr/bin/env perl:
not found" "User Commands"
Something is trying to exec("/usr/bin/env perl"), which won't work.
This could easily be fixed with a HOSTPERL variable or similar, so I could set
PERL for the _target_ and HOSTPERL=perl for the build.
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