Eric Bavier writes: > On Thu, 28 Jan 2016 18:00:35 +0100 > Mathieu Lirzin wrote: > >> OTOH I must admit that for maintainability reasons I would prefer >> avoiding complexity in Makefiles as much as possible. This means >> using Automake's abstract concepts as much as possible, having a >> simple dependency graph on top of that, and put things that don't fit >> well in this scheme in individual "build-aux/" scripts. For that >> reason I still prefer the embed help2man solution. but otherwise it >> looks nice. :) > > I sympathize with the concerns for maintainability. In this case, it > seems to me that a few lines of make/shell would be preferable to 20k > lines of perl. Perhaps the simpler attached patch is better? A few lines of Make/Shell seems more maintainable than a full perl program. But in this case the maintenance is handled upstream, so it only consists in updating the script periodically (which is still not ideal). Your patch is definitely better now since the hack is localized to a specific target. Let's use this solution! I have attached an updated version which simplifies how silent rules are handled and integrates changes from my initial patch.