How to use make to build multiple man pages?

Question

I am trying to automate building man pages in my project with make.

I have the following directory structure:

  my_project
    man/
      man1/
      man3/
      man5/
      man7/

Inside each of those directories, there is one or more .md files.

I would like to generate *.1, *.3, ..., pages when the corresponding man/man{1,3,5,7}/*.md is updated.

The relevant parts of my Makefile are:

MY_DOC := $(wildcard $(MY_PROJECT)/man/*/*.md)

all: $(MY_DOC:%.md=%.1)

%.1 %.3 %.5 %.7 : %.md
  @ronn --roff $?

The above is building .1 pages as intended, but .3, .5 and .7 always.

I can see $(MY_DOC:%.md=%.1) is replacing all .md with .1 which is one of the problems, but I don't know how to change that to mean 1, 3, 5 or 7 depending on the parent directory.

Answer 1

I was able to build man pages as intended and still use the substitution syntax.

MY_DOC := $(MY_PROJECT)/man
MAN1 := $(wildcard $(MY_DOC)/man1/*.md)
MAN3 := $(wildcard $(MY_DOC)/man3/*.md)
MAN5 := $(wildcard $(MY_DOC)/man5/*.md)
MAN7 := $(wildcard $(MY_DOC)/man7/*.md)

all: $(MAN1:%.md=%.1) $(MAN3:%.md=%.3) $(MAN5:%.md=%.5) $(MAN7:%.md=%.7)

%.1 %.3 %.5 %.7 : %.md
  @ronn --roff $?

I think there must be a simpler way to achieve this, but this is the best I was able to come up with.