Re: [PATCH 1/r47] maint: help2man targets should rely on the binaries they call.

[Gary V. Vaughan]

On 23 Sep 2010, at 00:35, Ralf Wildenhues wrote:
> Hello Gary,

Hallo Ralf,

> * Gary V. Vaughan wrote on Wed, Sep 22, 2010 at 07:05:48PM CEST:
>> The start of my post-release patch queue... okay to push?
>> 
>> * Makefile.am (doc/libtool.1, doc/libtoolize.1): Don't rely on
>> the intermediate files, since they might have changed without
>> giving make the opportunity to update the actual binaries that
>> help2man calls in time.
> 
> No, because 'libtool' is created in the build tree, and the manpages are
> distributed.  Distributed files may not depend on undistributed files,
> as that breaks building from a read-only source tree.  Moreover,
> help2man is something the user is expected to not have to install prior
> to building Libtool.

Yuck.  Another reason to always start afresh after making changes
rather than relying on make to DTRT :(

In my case, ltmain.sh was corrupted, but even though I fixed it,
rerunning make ended up leaving the empty manpages generated by
a libtool script that had no --version output, and *then* it
proceeded to rebuild ltmain.sh.

Is there no way to make sure help2man doesn't run until the
programs it wants to call have been rebuilt, rather than building
(and potentially distributing) manpages documenting options from the
previous script?

Cheers,
-- 
Gary V. Vaughan (address@hidden)

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