Hi,

I had a request to bump man-pages in Gentoo [0] and I must admit that
I've been fatigued recently, both by other work, but also the large
number of build system changes between man-pages releases.

I already try to review all build system changes but Recent Events (TM)
means that one must take even more care and not be fatigued by changes.

man-pages in particular is a critical package and if I can't review its
changes properly, I can't package updates to it.

There's a lot of churn commits like
* d0d2e2f9a21e623db208b599643e7728d71e7e6f,
* 57d0f8b4f1ba43fd4c4bfbe826d1b255c6ef9fd5,
* cdb8bd9563dd8a0d32138de40bc64f0c3475790c,
* 6658bc41a8d66afbf348126f8adcffe86227e2e1,
* d7b3f23c53d83ff714dd829c929a27f2c05aab23,
* 7de1139b82571dfe55224022e05e095a32b1ea89
and many others.

With regard to d0d2e2f9a21e623db208b599643e7728d71e7e6f specifically, it
might be worth explaining: a) what liba2i is; b) what commits were
actually pulled in (possibly with 'cherry-picked from ...' or shortlog
output or something at least.)

Alex already knows my feelings on homebrew complex Makefiles so I won't
repeat them here, but I will say that homebrew complex Makefiles
combined with a high amount of regular refactoring makes life much
harder.

Please consider either getting all the refactoring out of the way if
possible or reducing the amount of churn in the build system.

[0] https://bugs.gentoo.org/930798

thanks,
sam