Git's configure script --mandir doesn't work

I'm installing Git 2.2.0 from source distribution on NetBSD 6.1.5 (amd64) and when I specify --mandir=/usr/local/man, it still installs man pages in the default /usr/local/share/man directory. Is there a fix available for this?

On Thu, Dec 04, 2014 at 04:25:32PM -0700, Stephen Fisher wrote:

It works fine for me here (Debian):

  tar xzf git-2.2.0.tar.gz
  cd git-2.2.0
  ./configure --prefix=/tmp/foo --mandir=/tmp/bar
  make install-man

puts the manpages into /tmp/bar.

Can you elaborate on the commands you're running? After running the configure script, can you confirm that "mandir" is set appropriately in config.mak.autogen?

-Peff

On Fri, Dec 05, 2014 at 04:36:20AM -0500, Jeff King wrote:

Thanks for your reply and sorry for my delay in responding.

I'm executing ./configure --mandir=/usr/local/man --disable-pthreads then gmake and gmake install. I'm using gmake (GNU make) because I get Makefile errors with the regular BSD make, but that's another issue. I'm disabling pthreads because there is a linking error for undefined references to a few functions (I probably need to pass -lpthread in LDFLAGS, but haven't tried that yet).

mandir is properly set in config.mak.autogen.

When I set prefix to /tmp/foo and mandir to /tmp/bar like your example, it installs things into /tmp/foo, but /tmp/bar isn't even created.

I noticed text files in Documentation/ that look like the content of man pages, and when I run gmake in that directory, I get an error about asciidoc missing to make an HTML file. Is asciidoc required for the man pages as well? I don't see any files that appear to be man page format other than in perl/blib/man3 and those are installed (but not under the mandir prefix, rather the default /usr/local/share/man prefix).

On Wed, Dec 10, 2014 at 12:41:50PM -0700, Stephen Fisher wrote:

You have to build git with GNU make; there are several GNU-isms in the Makefile.

We should link against -lpthread automatically unless pthreads are disabled. So that may be an issue worth investigating.

Yes, you need asciidoc to build the manpages. However, there is a "make quick-install-man" target which will install pre-formatted manpages. You'll need to:

  git clone git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/git/git-manpages.git

next to your git.git clone. If you are installing from tarballs, I think there are manpage tarballs on kernel.org, as well.

It sounds like the manpage install bailed due to asciidoc failing. So the remaining bug is that the perl Makefile does not respect $(mandir). That does not surprise me too much. We use perl's MakeMaker to build that Makefile, and it looks like we just pass in the prefix, not individual paths.

-Peff