Re: Final PATCH for Re: IMPORTANT 3.0 PATCH: gcc_release

["Zack Weinberg" <zackw at Stanford dot EDU>]

On Thu, Jun 14, 2001 at 01:07:07AM -0700, Mark Mitchell wrote:
> 
> > Perhaps we should have a Makefile target that rebuilds all man-pages
> > from scratch?  Along the same lines, should `make all' and `make
> > bootstrap' also ensure that man-pages are up-to-date, rebuilding them
> > if needed?
> 
> I believe that `make bootstrap' should build all the documentation.
> It's part of the program; we should get in the habit of building
> it all the time.

I agree in principle.

There's a difficulty with the manpages - they require exotic tools.
They go through two stages of conversion to get to troff.  The first
stage is a pretty generic perl script, but we've never required perl
for builds (nor should we start - perl's very portable but it's big
and complicated and may require a C89 compiler to build).  The second
is pod2man, which is again perl, and our manpages exposed a whole
bunch of bugs in it, so you want a version no older than the one that
comes with perl 5.6.1.

It's like the bison-generated parsers: not a problem to require the
tools for users of CVS, but they need to be present in snapshots and
releases.

> Of course, for the release, we don't want to make that kind of change
> just now.  Would you be willing to manually regenerate the man
> pages and check them in, on the branch?

Will do for cpp.1, with the big manual rewrite.

-- 
zw   You have to care about the 'fair trial' part; you have to care about
     the 'due process of law' part, and you have to care about these things
     *more* than you care about putting child molestors away.
     	-- Graydon Saunders