I'm still wondering about whether and how to document this in the
manual.
I think one place would be the Preparing Distributions node, explaining
that distcheck and dist will fail if `missing'-generated man pages are
present.
And perhaps the maintainer-mode node, since that is where
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
Check that none of the man pages contain the error message. If any
do, error out with a descriptive message.
Ok, sounds good.
We could also move such a check into 'distcheck'. That way 'dist' could
still work if you don't have help2man, only 'distcheck' wouldn't.
I think it
* 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
Instead, it is a run-time requirement caused by the
--enable-mainter switch.
I was not aware that --enable-maintainer-mode has anything to do
with help2man.
Mhmm, I'm probably wrong: It doesn't hurt that dependencies to create
man pages are active even in a normal build (since those
I'm unsure however what would be better. Let 'missing' not
create the output file and exit 1? Let 'missing' create the
output file and exit 0, so that all man pages will contain the
`.ab' error message?
My opinion: Provide a switch to `missing' (say, `-k' or
`--keep-going', similar to the
wl My opinion: Provide a switch to `missing' (say, `-k' or
`--keep-going', similar to the same option in `make') .
But who's going to use it? missing is invoked in the bowels of the
generated Makefiles when help2man is not available. I'm not sure
there's a simple way to override it.
Karl Berry wrote:
Sorry, I still do. I don't see that texinfo is doing anything different
than (say) coreutils, wrt help2man.
Coreutils includes a copy of help2man with the distribution image so
that it will always be available. Whether perl is available to run it
is another story.
Bob
* Karl Berry wrote on Fri, Nov 28, 2008 at 01:04:22AM CET:
Wl If help2man is found, and --enable-maintainer-mode is active, simply
delete *all* man pages before rebuilding them.
It's not clear to me how to do that. The man page targets are normal
targets. Adding the equivalent of
Although I could change this in Texinfo as you suggest, it seems to
me it affects every package using help2man and there's no reason to
change Texinfo specially.
I don't think so. The difference to other packages is probably that
Sorry, I still do. I don't see that texinfo
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