Re: "@NCURSES_PATCH@" stale in man pages

[Thomas Dickey]

On Sat, Mar 30, 2024 at 02:29:41PM -0500, G. Branden Robinson wrote:
> Hi Thomas,
> 
> At 2024-03-30T15:09:47-0400, Thomas Dickey wrote:
> > not I - the dist.mk file is where the numbers come from(*)
> > and is used for generating the ".html" files, e.g.,
> > 
> > https://invisible-island.net/ncurses/man/terminfo.5.html
> 
> I found it.
> 
> "man_alias.sed" is generated by the _install_ target, and nothing ever
> cleans it--not "clean", and not "distclean".

It's removed in the distclean target at the end of man/Makefile:

distclean realclean: clean
        -rm -f Makefile *-config.1 ../edit_man.* ../man_alias.* man_db.renames

("make distclean" can remove things created by the configure script)

> It's not managed by make, but produced by a here document in the
> configure script.

there are a few of those - CF_MANPAGES is kind of long, even though I
factored out some reusable macros.
 
> I suspect my problem will never happen to someone building from a clean
> tree, but is there a straightforward way to make this less fragile?

not that I can see at the moment - if I'm recompiling without having
to re-run the configure script (or ./config.status after editing compiler
options...) it's been pretty robust.
 
> Not to whine, but the ncurses install target does _so much_ work besides
> just moving files to $DESTDIR--I'm uneasy with it.

I recall some long-ago discussion on that topic, but aside from
(promising to) refrain from modifying files in the source tree
during the install, haven't wanted to refrain from transforming
files as they're installed.

Packagers like to construct a tree with the "installed" files 
that can just be copied.  ncurses works with that arrangement
as well.  (For my own use, I build RPMs, debs, Arch, Slackware
and Solaris packages - but haven't found time to do the same for
Cygwin or msys2).

On the other extreme, I get complaints from people who imagine that they
should be able to do

        ./configure
        TERMINFO_DIRS=/opt/ncurses make install

and have everything transformed (manpages, utilities and database)
to follow that environment variable.

Of course they forget to send a patch as proof of concept :-)

-- 
Thomas E. Dickey <dickey@invisible-island.net>
https://invisible-island.net

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