Hi Ian, On Fri, Sep 11, 2026 at 08:16:25PM +0100, Ian Jackson wrote: > I see what you mean. Is this not something that help2man could > provide a helper for maybe? But maybe this is all specific to adns's > autoconf-but-not-automake setup.
I fear help2man is a deep rabbit hole. Its use typically breaks cross building. There are very many different approaches to handle this: * Include generated manual pages in the source package and rebuild them in native builds only. * Declare Build-Depends: $SELF:native <cross> and run help2man on the installed tools. * Build the package twice. Once for the .deb and once for help2man. This is only really feasible when there are few dependencies and the package is small. It is what I am suggesting here. * Write real manual pages. * Write a shell script that extracts the --help output from the source code without compilation (rarely works). * Skip installing manual pages in cross builds. (breaks reproducibility) * Fail cross building unless you pass the nodoc build profile. As you can see, the solution space is big. In general, my impression is that manual pages generated using help2man can mostly be deleted. Their only reason to exist is to make lintian happy and you could just add an override instead. Helmut
