Re: [bug-gettext] gettext source contains help2man. Is this really needed?

[Daiki Ueno]

Santiago Vila <address@hidden> writes:

> While fixing the previous bug I noticed that the build process
> modifies msgfmt.1. This is because we modify msgfmt so that it always
> output little endian.
>
> But I don't really want msgfmt.1 to be modified just because of this.
>
> In the past I used to insert a suitable "touch" command somewhere in
> debian/rules so that msgfmt.1 was not considered "outdated". Is there
> any better way?

A possible idea is to compare the output of help2man with the existing
one, and don't overwrite it if they are identical (except the date), in
a similar way to the msgmerge call in po/Makefile.in.in.  I personally
feel it as a bit over-engineering, though.

> Should help2man be really part of the gettext source tarball? I would
> think that it is on the same level as automake or autoconf.

I don't know, but some other projects (e.g. coreutils) also ships a copy
of help2man for some reasons.

Regards,
-- 
Daiki Ueno