Is there a typical way to disable manpages generation using autotools?

Question

I am compiling an old version of GNU coreutils(version 6.10/6.11) using autotools. However when I do some modifications in the source code directory there will be some errors when generating man pages.

As I don't care about the manpage at all, I hope the default target doesn't include manpage's generation.

There might not be a general solution for all kinds of source code managed by autotools, however I believe there must be a typical approach, especially for GNU coreutils.

Any advice will be appreciated:-)

Answer 1

I don't think building manpages is a built-in task of any sort. I believe it is usually just a subdirectory or specific target that is being run. You can probably just find the part of the Makefile.am responsible for building the man page and disable it. Either by removing the SUBDIR entry for the directory or by removing whatever target references the manpages target.

Answer 2

Regarding installation:

At least for projects like Libssh2 and LibCurl, you can just do a make install-exec instead of make install.

Conversely, if you just want the man pages, you should do a make install-data.

I am not sure if these targets exist in every autotools project though.

Answer 3

The error is due to the correct path for manpages not being found ,which will be mostly docbooks.xsl (as it is for me). So find the docbooks path

find /usr -name docbooks.xsl

This will list all available paths related to docbooks.xsl.

Find the correct docbooks required by make and paste it in the file