Re: Help2man and Parallel Make Race

[Peter Johansson]

On 11/20/12 8:44 AM, Neil T. Dantam wrote:
> > >  That's the route that GNU coreutils has taken recently; in the unlikely
> > >  case perl is absent on the the build system, dummy man-pages are
> > >  generated.
> This would also not work when cross-compiling, I think, since manpages
> would always be regenerated when the binaries are built and the
> cross-compiled binaries would not run on the build machine.
We decided we didn't wanted to ship (or require help2man), so when we 
converted to non-recursive Makefile, we solved this problem by added 
dependency

foo.1: foo$(EXEEXT)

but this dependency is only turned on if foo.1 is not present (at 
configure time) or if '.svn' is present. The latter indicating that we 
are not building from a tarball. These conditions are checked at 
configure time and propagated to the makefile via an AM_CONDITIONAL.

I'm not 100% happy with this solution though because it creates a 
different dependency graph for maintainers and users similar to 
AM_MAINTAINER_MODE.

Cheers,
Peter

--
Peter Johansson