Unclear how to handle man page generation

[julianandrews]

I use help2man to generate the man page for my project, and that needs to run post-build but before deb generation. Right now I generate the man page manually and add it to the repo. That works, but isn't ideal.

Since cargo build doesn't support post-build scripts, I was hoping there would be some way to tell cargo deb to run some post-build logic, but I'm not seeing a clean way to make that happen.

Is there a recommended way to generate the man page (or generally do post-build pre-cargo-deb logic)?

[ximon18]

Use --no-build and handle this youreelf?

[kornelski]

Cargo doesn't support generation of man pages:

rust-lang/cargo#545

and cargo-deb just wraps cargo build, so you need to create a workaround for this yourself.

[julianandrews]

I thought that might be the case, but wanted to check. Thanks!

I should be able to cobble something together using --no-build and some manual logic. For my purposes I can just write a shell script to generate the .deb. It won't be cross-platform, but then neither is help2man so that's no loss for me.

It would be really helpful if there were some documentation somewhere suggesting workarounds. Though, I recognize that as things stand there isn't an obvious best approach to recommend which makes that kind of tricky.

[AlexTMjugador]

I realize I'm probably a bit late to this party, but the cargo-xtask convention is probably what you're looking for to implement custom post-build steps like this.

[julianandrews]

I realize I'm probably a bit late to this party, but the cargo-xtask convention is probably what you're looking for to implement custom post-build steps like this.

Yeah, I looked at cargo-xtask. In the end I decided that for my use case, where I basically just want to call help2man that would add a lot of boilerplate for minimal benefit over just calling a shell script from CI. I definitely don't want to re-arrange my whole project layout for workspaces to enable man page building, and while that's not strictly required, the README explicitly recommends against doing xtasks without workspaces.

I can see how cargo-xtask could be useful when you need to do something complicated, or if you need cross platform compatibility, but it's hard to justify all that added complexity when what I want to do is just a few lines of bash.