I currently do not have yodl2man installed. I was building rsync from the git repository to verify a different change. The cp commands relying on the existence of rsync.1 and rsyncd.conf.5 failed since those files did not exist. That man-copy target should rely on rsync.1 and rsyncd.conf.5 it seems.
Created attachment 11943 [details] patch adding man page dependencies This patch makes the two files dependencies triggering them to be generated. They still fail in my case since I don't have yodl2man, but they'd be generated if I did. If the intention is to use the man files if there but ignore them if not, then the patch would have to be different.
The "man" target depends on the *.1 & *.5 files so that they get created. The "man-copy" target just tries to copy pre-existing files from the srcdir (which is useful if someone is building an unchanged tar distribution) -- it just outputs a non-fatal error if they aren't found. I've tweaked the Makefile to output a less alarming warning while still mentioning when the man pages did not get created. For the case of a later install of yodl, configure would need to be rerun to change the Makefile's "all" target to depend on "man" instead of "man-copy" (or the user could run "make man" explicitly).