* Werner LEMBERG wrote on Fri, Nov 28, 2008 at 07:18:46AM CET: > > > Anyway, maintainer-mode isn't very interesting; few packages use it. > > The more important question is what to do in non-maintainer mode, > > where (it seems to me) exactly the same problem will occur. For > > instance, in GNU Hello (well, except that has only one man page) or > > coreutils. > > Well, if `make' called by the user has to generate man pages with the > use of help2man, there *must* be a configure check for it. I don't > see a problem.
The point is that this problem should only ever show up when you use VCS sources to build from, never from a release tarball: the tarball should always contain a copy of the man pages, and not need to rebuild them. Thus it would be over-reaching for example, to require that help2man is present, when configure is run from an extracted tarball. Cheers, Ralf
