Re: maint: Distribute help2man script.

Simon Josefsson via Bug reports for the GNU Internet utilities <[email protected]> Sat, 19 Apr 2025 12:30:44 +0200

Newsgroups	gmane.comp.gnu.inetutils.bugs
Message-ID	<[email protected]>

Collin Funk <[email protected]> writes:

> The CI for Inetutils fails to build on OpenBSD [1] since this platform
> does not have a help2man package.
>
> I have pushed the attached patch to distribute the help2man script like
> Coreutils does.

Thanks for the finding!  Is that building from tarball or from git?

But please, let's not add more copies of external tools to version
control sources.  That is a software supply-chain nightmare.  How would
we keep this copy of help2man synchronized with upstream, which could
warrant quick action in case security bugs?  Who will spend time
auditing this?

We should prominently document the build/runtime dependencies, maybe
using a DEPENDENCIES file like Bruno does in some projects (which I
recently started to use in libidn too).  If we don't mention help2man
already.

InetUtils has another CI running at GitLab:

https://gitlab.com/gsasl/inetutils/-/pipelines/1776170049

Alas no BSD runners but should be easy to add, I manage a OpenBSD runner
for other projects.

I think that people building InetUtils in a BSD machine simply have to
install help2man.  We can't vendor every tool that is missing.  We can
install help2man in the CI too, just install it before building.  What
do you think about that solution?

> diff --git a/.x-update-copyright b/.x-update-copyright
> new file mode 100644
> index 00000000..ad9c8533
> --- /dev/null
> +++ b/.x-update-copyright
> @@ -0,0 +1,4 @@
> +^COPYING$
> +^bootstrap$
> +^doc/fdl\.texi$
> +^man/help2man$

There is no need for these .x-* files anymore, put exceptions in cfg.mk
instead.

/Simon

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