Guillem Jover <[email protected]> writes: > On Wed, 2026-05-06 at 20:54:05 +0200, Simon Josefsson wrote: >> I think that's an opinionated preference: the risk of having obsolete >> stale man pages is considerable, especially for fast-moving packages >> which often is the case for Go packages. This is a subjective >> maintainer decision, so up to you. Although it seems a bit weird to now >> have a mostly help2man-generated static file shipped, which begs the >> question if the file is the preferred form of making modifications to. > > If by opinionated preference you mean not wanting to cause > cross-building failures, or not wanting to introduce packaging > complexity to avoid those, then I guess?
I think what you proposed simply have different downsides and upsides
compared to what I often tend to use.
My approach is below, it could be tweaked to support cross-building
without the nodoc profile was deemed important, if it doesn't already
work. Golang-* packages are not often cross-built, is anyone doing
that?
This approach is low complexity, and tested in 10+ packages. It avoids
the risk of shipping stale man-pages. It does not need any
package-specific maintainer action: no manual maintainer help2man build
rule and README.source explanation, nor a custom hand-maintained static
debian/foo.1 file.
I don't think it is fair to characterize this approach as universally a
less good choice. I believe this is mostly a matter of taste and
personal preference. Thus, I disagree with what you said "A static man
page is superior in any possible way" and believe that to be an
opinionated exaggeration.
debian/control:
Build-Depends: ... help2man <!nodoc> ...
debian/rules:
include /usr/share/dpkg/pkg-info.mk # DEB_VERSION
B = $(CURDIR)/debian/tmp/usr/bin
M = $(CURDIR)/debian/tmp/usr/share/man/man1
ifeq (,$(filter nodoc,$(DEB_BUILD_PROFILES)))
execute_before_dh_installman-arch:
mkdir -pv $(M)
help2man --version-string="$(DEB_VERSION)" \
--name="Sigstore OCI image verification" \
--no-info --no-discard-stderr \
$(B)/oci-image-verification -o $(M)/oci-image-verification.1
endif
/Simon
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