On Thu, Nov 20, 2008 at 10:19 AM, Roger Leigh <rleigh@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > And yet the fact that it won't propagate makes it totally useless: > all the other people using the repo won't get the extra metadata > that will prevent build failures. Having the extra data locally > is nice, but not exactly what I'd call a solution. The whole point > of what I want is to have it as an integral part of the repo. Easiest way is typically something like this in the makefile: docbook_version = $(shell docbook2man --version 2>/dev/null) ifneq "$docbook_version","" mymanpage.1: ## Real docbook build rules here else mymanpage.1: if [ -e $@ ]; then \ echo "No 'docbook' installed, using pregenerated man pages" >&2 ; \ else \ echo "Pregenerated manpages are missing and no docbook found!" >&2 ; \ exit 1 ; \ fi endif Such stuff will take an order of magnitude less time than trying to patch GIT to preserve metadata that most projects don't want preserved. You may also find it's easier to just comment out the documentation build rules if you are always guaranteeing that the docs have been compiled. Cheers, Kyle Moffett -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe git" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html