[GRASS-dev] winGRASS compilation: perl not found (needed for MAN)

[Glynn Clements]

Markus Neteler wrote:

> > I've never noticed it, because man/Makefile silently skips building
> > the manpages if Perl isn't present (I don't have it on Windows).
> 
> That's right but "tar" complains (read: warns) about the missing man
> stuff later. Perhaps it has to be conditionalized upon perl presence
> as well.

It's better to test what's actually required (i.e. the presence of the
dist.<arch>/man directory).

> > Maybe we should use the Python version from 7.0? Many users will want
> > Python anyhow, whereas Perl is only used for g.html2man.
> 
> Sounds good, we would get rid of a dependency.

g.html2man.py shouldn't have any actual dependencies of its own. 
However, I did have to clean up quite a few files in 7.0 to get the
parser to accept them (it's an actual HTML parser, and not
particularly fault-tolerant; the Perl version is just regexp
search/replace, so it might fail but it won't complain).

> > OTOH, how many Windows users will want nroff manpages?
> 
> Likely 0.001%. It was more for a potential breakage of the packaging
> process.

Then it's probably beter to just modify the packager.

-- 
Glynn Clements <glynn at gclements.plus.com>