Hello Bruno, * Bruno Haible wrote on Wed, Aug 23, 2006 at 10:40:31PM CEST: > Ralf Wildenhues wrote: > > We could ask help2man to have it return a different exit > > status if it gets an exit status of 126 from the program, and have it > > return 63 then, which `missing' will interpret as version mismatch. > > Uuhhh. I'm not sure you get a defined exit status when you try to execute > a program from a different platform. On older platforms, such as SunOS 4, > an executable from a different platform was piped into /bin/sh by the > exec() calls, yielding tons of error messages.
Oh. Not that the autotools still support SunOS 4 in general, but that'd still be ugly. > > I can take this to bug-help2man if we can agree on proposing the change. > > Why would it be help2man's business to deal with cross-compiles? IMO it > is configure's business. What do you think about this patch? First, I think you wouldn't want `make' to keep trying to update hello.1, so a rule like if test '$(cross_compiling)' = yes; then touch $@; else \ $(HELP2MAN) --name="Friendly Greeting Program" ../src/hello -o $@; \ fi would be suited a bit better. Second though, there are many "cross-compiling" situations where executing the program actually works, so the above is at least a wee bit suboptimal. (Think i486 -> i686, or Cygwin -> MinGW, or some simulator: on my GNU/Linux system, w32 binaries are automatically sent to wine for consumption...) But I'd agree with Karl that this issue isn't important enough to warrant investing a lot of work. Cheers, Ralf