Re: [PATCH] build: do not require help2man at build-from-tarball time

[Jim Meyering]

Pádraig Brady wrote:
> On 10/24/2012 08:56 AM, Jim Meyering wrote:
>> Would anyone object to making perl a build-time prerequisite?
>> I.e., would this cause serious inconvenience?
>
> Probably less inconvenience than a broken make -j ;)

Note that it is broken only when building from a tarball-based
build in which you have modified a source file.
However, with most distributions, that's precisely the use case:
download tarball, unpack, apply distro-specific patches and build.

>> If you're building on a system for which you do not run all of
>> the perl-dependent tests, you can't be very serious about quality.
>
> If `make check` needs it, then it's a requirement IMHO.

Depends on the definition of "need".
In order to run a decent percentage of tests, perl is needed.
However, it is not needed if all you care about is "make check" exiting
successfully (even though all perl-using tests were skipped).

> Now I do really like the idea of minimizing dependencies,
> so for graceful degradation without perl, I suppose
> the best approach would be to skip the .pl tests and

That is already done.

> `echo "warning"; touch $manpage`.

Sounds good.  I.e., it sounds like we want Stefano's patch, after all.

As you recall, a nice side effect is that we will
no longer distribute the generated man/*.1 files.

Stefano, would you care to rebase your patch?