GNU bug report logs - #76735
Shepherd parallel make help2man issue

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From: Ludovic Courtès <ludo <at> gnu.org>
To: Simon Josefsson <simon <at> josefsson.org>
Cc: 76735 <at> debbugs.gnu.org
Subject: bug#76735: Shepherd parallel make help2man issue
Date: Mon, 10 Mar 2025 21:03:23 +0100

Hi Simon,

Simon Josefsson <simon <at> josefsson.org> 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’.

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