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 missing is discussed, explaining about the help2man "replacement" not failing. (By the way, I find it odd that that node contains two subsections, instead of them being their own nodes.) The only place that now talks about help2man specifically is distcleancheck, in an example. That doesn't seem like the right place. I noticed a typo in that node, though: Because we don't to force want our users to install `help2man', "want" should be deleted. Thanks for all your work, as always. karl