Re: [PATCH] dist: add new "pure-dist" automake option

[Zack Weinberg]

On Fri, Jul 2, 2021 at 11:09 AM Allison Karlitskaya
<allison.karlitskaya@redhat.com> wrote:
>
> Since v1.15.1-204-gac47c22e3, "make dist" has been depending on
> $(BUILT_SOURCES) to avoid problems when building some GNU packages which
> need to compile themselves as part of building their tarballs (for
> example, to generate manpage content from --help output).

I have no comment on your patch, but I want to mention that the
"compile self in order to generate manpages that go into the tarball"
process is troublesome for several other reasons; for the recent
release of autoconf itself, I wound up writing a script that
insinuates itself into where help2man was looking for the executables
and extracts the --help text directly from the *source*.

zw