Subject: bug#8289: distcheck and make dvi

From: [email-masked] (Karl Berry)
Date: Sun, 20 Mar 2011 21:28:59 GMT

However, there are cases where dvi output just
    isn't feasible in practice.

Yep.  Therein lies the essence of the problem.

    not bother checking dvi output and rather test PDF output seems
    like another good alternative.

I can't agree with that.  That's trading DVI-generation problems for
PDF-generation problems.  Believe me, there will be just as many if not
more.  Any manual which has *only* eps files, for starters.

All together, for a general fix, my suggestion is to simply replace the
hardwired "dvi" string with a new variable name, like
$(AM_DISTCHECK_DOC) or some such (no idea if that's a reasonable name,
but you get the idea), which defaults to dvi and which users can
override either with "pdf" or with some no-op target.  Which in turn
would need to be created/documented if one doesn't exist already.

How does that sound?

    jack> violate the GNU coding standards, to which automake-generated
    makefiles are meant to comply?

The dvi: pdf kludge was a user override.  The coding standards aren't an
issue in that case.

Thanks,
k