Hello Peter, * Peter Breitenlohner wrote on Wed, Jan 23, 2008 at 10:28:28AM CET: [...] > My frustration was mostly due to the fact that I never got any reaction. I > think I could have provided a ChangeLog entry and a test, if asked for it.
And lack of communication on my side certainly didn't help. > I recently stumbled (once again) at two other manpage related automake > problems, where I'd like to try for solutions provided there is a realistic > chance that such solutions would be included in a future automake release. > The problems are these: > > (1) In some cases it is completely inadequate to apply the program name > transform to manpage names. E.g., in the man-db package there is manpath.1 > describing the manpath command (should be transformed), and manpath.5 > describing the format of the manpath configuration file (should certainly > not be transformed). Yes that is a problem. Your example shows that even a suitably detailed transform script won't help if two manpages differ only in their extension. > Maybe that could be taken care of by something like notransform_MAN_MANS > (needs a better name). notrans_man_MANS sounds good to me. > Moreover, renaming "manpath"=>"xmanpath" and "manpath.1"=>"xmanpath.1" > without changing the manpage contents is sort of strange. Well, isn't that in the realm of the rules generating manpath.1? Not that I say it's nice, but I don't either think Automake can just blindly do some transformation on the contents it would see fit. > (2) There are packages with translated manpages -- good. But automake > provides no way to supress their installation or to install them for a > subset of the available languages -- not good. > > At the moment all available translated manpages are installed > unconditionally (under the assumption that the packaging system of a > distribution takes care of this?). I think something analogous to > --disable-nls and/or LINGUAS=xxx for translated manpages is very desirable. Colin submitted this: <http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-automake/2007-10/msg00015.html> but I haven't had time to think about it. The biggest problem I see is how to define suitable interfaces (LINGUAS is already used by gettext, shouldn't stomp on that). Suggestions welcome. Cheers, Ralf
