help2man

help2man

[Richard Purdie]

The more I look at and think about help2man, the more it looks like
something we just shouldn't need/use.

In summary, it runs a binary and captures its --help output. This rules
it out from being useful in most cross compiling scenarios, i.e. all
target packages.

In the -native/-cross cases, we don't really care about man pages.

I'm therefore thinking we should really just drop the dependency and
symlink help2man to /bin/false. The missing script in autotools should
then just silently touch the man page files instead of regenerating
them.

I tried to figure out which recipes actually use help2man:

$ grep HELP2MAN * -r --exclude=Makefile.in 2> /dev/null | grep -v missing

and against a core-image-sato this gave:

libtool
libtasn1
gettext
automake
autoconf
flex
bison
m4

which isn't that many recipes to go and beat up manually if necessary.
It certainly doesn't warrant a global include in autotools.bbclass IMO.

Cheers,

Richard

Re: help2man

[Khem Raj]

On 9/29/2011 4:58 AM, Richard Purdie wrote:
> The more I look at and think about help2man, the more it looks like
> something we just shouldn't need/use.
>
> In summary, it runs a binary and captures its --help output. This rules
> it out from being useful in most cross compiling scenarios, i.e. all
> target packages.

right. This should be disabled for cross builds. May be it should be
disabled in autotools bbclass do_configure itself.

>
> In the -native/-cross cases, we don't really care about man pages.
>
> I'm therefore thinking we should really just drop the dependency and
> symlink help2man to /bin/false. The missing script in autotools should
> then just silently touch the man page files instead of regenerating
> them.
>
> I tried to figure out which recipes actually use help2man:
>
> $ grep HELP2MAN * -r --exclude=Makefile.in 2>  /dev/null | grep -v missing
>
> and against a core-image-sato this gave:
>
> libtool
> libtasn1
> gettext
> automake
> autoconf
> flex
> bison
> m4
>
> which isn't that many recipes to go and beat up manually if necessary.
> It certainly doesn't warrant a global include in autotools.bbclass IMO.
>
> Cheers,
>
> Richard
>
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Openembedded-core mailing list
> Openembedded-core@lists.openembedded.org
> http://lists.linuxtogo.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/openembedded-core