Re: [Bug-wget] pod2man --utf8 -> wget build failure

[Ryan Schmidt]

On May 24, 2016, at 5:55 AM, Tim Ruehsen wrote:

> Hi Karl,
> 
> thanks for pointing out those issue(s).
> 
>> Perl... Exactly which version does not matter.
> 
> It matters. AFAICS, Perl 5.8 introduced UTF-8 in 2002.
> So perhaps your system is even older !?
> (Just out of curiosity, what is it ?)

MacPorts users observed this problem with Mac OS X 10.6 "Snow Leopard", which 
was released in 2009.

https://trac.macports.org/ticket/50164

We addressed it by using a newer pod2man installed by MacPorts instead of the 
older one included with OS X.


> That lets me ask why are you sticking around with old software *and* at the 
> same time you try to build latest software (at least wget).

Some users dislike the user interface changes Apple made in OS X 10.7 and later 
and stick with 10.6 by choice. Others have older computers incapable of running 
newer versions of OS X, or they believe the performance of their computer will 
be adversely affected by upgrading to newer versions of OS X. Nevertheless, 
they may wish to install software like wget that's not included with the OS. 

Requiring a newer pod2man is not terrible, and for users using a package 
manager is not an inconvenience if the package maintainer added the right 
dependencies. However, I don't disagree with Karl that including pre-generated 
manpages in the source tarball might be reasonable, just as it is reasonable to 
pre-generate the configure script and Makefiles. Also, I am in favor of 
configure-time checks for the capabilities you need. If you need pod2man to 
support --utf8, I would expect the configure script to check for that and bail 
with a helpful error message (e.g. recommending upgrading the perl 
installation), rather than failing at build time.