Re: [PATCH 06/13] build: Generate man pages after compiling guile objects.

[Ludovic Courtès]

Mathieu Lirzin <address@hidden> skribis:

> This improves compilation speed since scripts are not compiled twice.
> When building with ‘make -j4‘ from a clean repository on an Intel
> i5-2540M, the time of compilation gets from:
>
> real  5m7.220s
> user  18m49.788s
> sys   0m12.964s
>
> down to:
>
> real  2m20.820s
> user  7m25.992s
> sys   0m7.464s
>
> * configure.ac (BUILD_FROM_GIT): New Automake conditional.
> * doc.am (SUBCOMMANDS): Delete variable.
> (dist_man1_MANS): List all subcommands man pages.
> (doc/guix.1): Build only if BUILD_FROM_GIT.  Depend on 'scripts/guix'
> instead of all subcommands.
> [BUILD_DAEMON] (doc/guix-daemon): Likewise.  Replace the
> 'nix/nix-daemon/guix-daemon.cc' prerequisite with 'guix-daemon'.
> [BUILD_FROM_GIT] (gen_man): New variable.
> [BUILD_FROM_GIT] (doc/guix-%.1): New target.
> (CLEANFILES) [BUILD_FROM_GIT]: Add $(dist_man1_MANS).

I like the speedup, but not the ‘BUILD_FROM_GIT’ approach.  :-)
It reminds me of maintainer-mode and all its warts (info "(automake)
maintainer-mode").

Namely, I think it’s best to have the help2man rule always triggered
whenever the corresponding .scm file is newer, rather than have it
triggered or not based on a guess of what the user wants/can do.

Having said that, I’m not sure what to do.  Commit 0af3f404 reverted the
original approach, which was to depend on .go files (and obviously
wouldn’t work as we want.)

So we want to delay the build of man pages without making the dependency
on build products explicit.  Hmm, not sure what can be done.

Thoughts?

Ludo’.