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

[Ralf Wildenhues]

Hello Gary,

* Gary V. Vaughan wrote on Wed, Sep 22, 2010 at 10:29:44PM CEST:
> On 23 Sep 2010, at 00:35, Ralf Wildenhues wrote:
> > * Gary V. Vaughan wrote on Wed, Sep 22, 2010 at 07:05:48PM CEST:
> >> * 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.

I can try to debug it, if you can show me how to reliably reproduce the
failure.

> 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?

I outlined four separate possible approaches for this in another mail in
this thread already.

Cheers,
Ralf