Subject: bug#76735: Shepherd parallel make help2man issue

From: Ludovic Courtès <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 10 Mar 2025 21:03:23 +0100

Hi Simon,

Simon Josefsson <[email-masked]> skribis:

> Ah.  The Debian packaging intentionally removes the prebuilt manpages
> because we want to know that we can rebuild them from source.  That is
> what is triggering this problem!

Oh.  That makes perfect sense from a reproducible build perspective.

> Thanks for developing that patch.  This problem is complex, and I'm not
> sure what the best solution really is.  Your patch makes the man pages
> depend on the binary, and I've had bad experiences with that.  If
> someone is cross-compile Shepherd (not sure if that's a realistic
> situation) then help2man can't run the binary, and in this situation it
> would be preferable to fall back on the prebuilt manpages.  That doesn't
> sound ideal.

Right, I had forgotten about cross-compilation (we do rely on it in
Guix).

So in practice, we have no choice but to build the tarball natively and
then (cross-)build from the tarball.

> Maybe an uglier solution is to try to run help2man, and if it works,
> then fine, but if it doesn't, re-use the prebuilt manpage or fail.

Yeah.

Or, longer-term, extract command-line metadata from the Guile modules
and generate man pages without resorting to ‘help2man’.

Ludo’.