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Bug 778551 - Build failure in Continuous caused by unconditional build of man pages
Build failure in Continuous caused by unconditional build of man pages
Status: RESOLVED FIXED
Product: NetworkManager
Classification: Platform
Component: Documentation
git master
Other Linux
: Normal normal
: ---
Assigned To: NetworkManager maintainer(s)
NetworkManager maintainer(s)
Depends on:
Blocks:
 
 
Reported: 2017-02-13 10:14 UTC by Emmanuele Bassi (:ebassi)
Modified: 2017-02-13 23:13 UTC
See Also:
GNOME target: ---
GNOME version: ---



Description Emmanuele Bassi (:ebassi) 2017-02-13 10:14:13 UTC
NM generates man pages for its CLI tools and for its configuration files.

The existing build directives are a bit muddled, but they go like this:

 - if enable_gtk_doc is false (--disable-gtk-doc was used) then configure checks whether the man pages are already generated, and if they are then it will tell automake to install the pre-generated ones
 - automake has a rule that only installs man pages if introspection is enabled; if so, it can either generate the man pages or install the pre-generated ones.

Generating man pages uses the docbook XML and style sheets to turn the XML files into troff ones.

CI build systems tend to avoid installing docbook because it makes the build system size balloon out of control pretty quickly (you get to install docbook and then texlive and then you start questioning your life choices). 

It would be great if NetworkManager had a toggle to just skip building the man pages, just like other projects have an explicit toggle to build them, instead of doing all of this automagically and through the interaction of different configure-time arguments and whether or not some files already exist.
Comment 1 Thomas Haller 2017-02-13 15:27:15 UTC
reference: https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=775003#c13
Comment 2 Thomas Haller 2017-02-13 23:13:19 UTC
I think this should be fixed with commit https://cgit.freedesktop.org/NetworkManager/NetworkManager/commit/?id=b599f1b74353e61ad127181039a1c10945a3f10e

Please see the commit message for the details.


In short, if you now pass --disable-gtk-doc, no man pages nor setting docs will be build,
and the build failure from  https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=775003#c13 should be avoided.


Please reopen if you find an issue. Thanks!