problem on generating man pages with newer autotools

problem on generating man pages with newer autotools

[Iru Cai]

Hi,

I'm trying to package binutils 2.37 on Arch Linux, but find the man 
pages in the package are all empty. After looking into the issue, I can 
see the doc Makefiles invoke automake-1.15, while my system has automake 
1.16.

How can I solve this problem if I don't install an old version of 
autotools? I've tried to run autoreconf on the subdirectories of 
binutils, but this results in a build error.

Thanks,
Iru

Re: problem on generating man pages with newer autotools

[Michael Matz]

Hello,

On Thu, 25 Nov 2021, Iru Cai via Binutils wrote:

> I'm trying to package binutils 2.37 on Arch Linux, but find the man 
> pages in the package are all empty. After looking into the issue, I can 
> see the doc Makefiles invoke automake-1.15, while my system has automake 
> 1.16.

That's not the problem.  Rather the problem is that the 2.37 release 
tarball contains wrongly pre-generated man pages (empty ones).  That the 
man pages are included in a release tarball is correct: it's supposed to 
have fewer build requirements than random git checkouts, but in this case 
it has the effect that even with the right tools available they aren't 
remade, so the empty ones are used.

Do this in the unpacked source directory:
rm -f binutils/doc/*.1
rm -f binutils/doc/cxxfilt.man
rm -f gprof/*.1
rm -f gas/doc/*.1
rm -f ld/*.1


Ciao,
Michael.

Re: problem on generating man pages with newer autotools

[Iru Cai]

Hello,

On 2021/11/26 00:14, Michael Matz wrote:
> That's not the problem.  Rather the problem is that the 2.37 release
> tarball contains wrongly pre-generated man pages (empty ones).  That the
Oh, I can see the pre-generated ones in 2.36.1 are not empty.
> man pages are included in a release tarball is correct: it's supposed to
> have fewer build requirements than random git checkouts, but in this case
> it has the effect that even with the right tools available they aren't
> remade, so the empty ones are used.
>
> Do this in the unpacked source directory:
> rm -f binutils/doc/*.1
> rm -f binutils/doc/cxxfilt.man
> rm -f gprof/*.1
> rm -f gas/doc/*.1
> rm -f ld/*.1

Hmm, I do this before build. And after the build, I go into gas/doc and 
run ``rm as.1; make as.1`` again, and it doesn't require autotools. The 
reason I saw the automake-1.16 thing is that I ran ``make -B`` previously.

Instead, it's this error that make the build system generate empty man 
pages (texi2pod.pl doesn't support --no-split option):

perl ../../../gas/doc/../../etc/texi2pod.pl -I "../../../gas/doc" -I 
"../../../gas/../libiberty" -I "../../../gas/../bfd/doc" -I 
../../bfd/doc --no-split -Dman < ../../../gas/doc/as.texi > as.pod
usage: ../../../gas/doc/../../etc/texi2pod.pl [-D toggle...] [infile 
[outfile]]

Iru

Re: problem on generating man pages with newer autotools

[Alan Modra]

On Fri, Nov 26, 2021 at 09:08:53AM +0800, Iru Cai via Binutils wrote:
> Instead, it's this error that make the build system generate empty man pages
> (texi2pod.pl doesn't support --no-split option):

Fixed with git commit 96a7037cd85

https://sourceware.org/pipermail/binutils/2021-July/117503.html

-- 
Alan Modra
Australia Development Lab, IBM