Outdated help2man; avoiding needing to "build" help2man.pl

[Don Armstrong]

In stepmake/stepmake/help2man-rules.make, I ran across the following:

# We must invoke the generated $(outdir)/help2man script instead of
# the help2man.pl source, which means that the scripts/build directory
# must be built first.
#
# From the perlrun man-page:
#
#       If the #! line does not contain the word "perl", the
#       program named after the #! is executed instead of the Perl
#       interpreter.  This is slightly bizarre, but it helps
#
# Indeed it is.  Perl sucks.
#
# Two screenfulls explaining that the otherwise standard #! is broken
# for perl, and arguing that this broken magic is better in some
# cases.  Four more explaining what a line comment is, and that it may
# be parsed, same here.

While it's correct, you can trivially work around this problem by
changing

address@hidden@ -w 

to 

address@hidden@ -w 
#! perl -w

in scripts/build/help2man.pl, and then calling it with perl -x
help2man.pl instead of just perl help2man.pl. Also, the version of
help2man.pl distributed is quite seriously outdated, and doesn't
properly escape - in its output. [The Debian package will be patched
to call a more recent version of help2man; it'd probably also be nice
to have real manpages for these programs too, but it's at least a
start.]


Don Armstrong

-- 
Maybe I did steal your heart
and I am such a perfect criminal
that you never noticed
 -- a softer world #481
    http://www.asofterworld.com/index.php?id=481

http://www.donarmstrong.com              http://rzlab.ucr.edu