[OE-core] help2man
Richard Purdie
richard.purdie at linuxfoundation.org
Thu Sep 29 11:58:54 UTC 2011
The more I look at and think about help2man, the more it looks like
something we just shouldn't need/use.
In summary, it runs a binary and captures its --help output. This rules
it out from being useful in most cross compiling scenarios, i.e. all
target packages.
In the -native/-cross cases, we don't really care about man pages.
I'm therefore thinking we should really just drop the dependency and
symlink help2man to /bin/false. The missing script in autotools should
then just silently touch the man page files instead of regenerating
them.
I tried to figure out which recipes actually use help2man:
$ grep HELP2MAN * -r --exclude=Makefile.in 2> /dev/null | grep -v missing
and against a core-image-sato this gave:
libtool
libtasn1
gettext
automake
autoconf
flex
bison
m4
which isn't that many recipes to go and beat up manually if necessary.
It certainly doesn't warrant a global include in autotools.bbclass IMO.
Cheers,
Richard
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