Re: PostgreSQL-9.0alpha: jade required?

On Thu, Mar 4, 2010 at 9:15 AM, Peter Eisentraut <peter_e(at)gmx(dot)net> wrote:
> On ons, 2010-02-24 at 12:16 -0500, Tom Lane wrote:
>> Joe Conway <mail(at)joeconway(dot)com> writes:
>> > Related to this I have noticed in recent weeks on my own development
>> > machine that "make install" takes *much* longer, but only sporadically,
>> > due to the docs building.
>>
>> This might be related to Peter's changes to the docs build procedure.
>> The way things work now is that if you've built the docs in the past,
>> and haven't cleaned them out with "make maintainer-clean" (distclean
>> doesn't cut it), then an ordinary "make install" will install the
>> html files --- and first it will update them if they're out of date
>> relative to the source SGML files.
>
> One possible change I have been pondering is to move that logic to the
> "all" target.  That is, if you have built the docs in the past and "make
> install" would rebuild them, then "make all" will also rebuild them.
> That doesn't fix the underlying issue for some people's workflows, but
> at least it removes the element of surprise from "make install", which
> is expected to be fast compared to "make all".
>
> The problem with that approach, however, is that issuing "make all" in
> the doc/src/sgml/ directory would never build anything at all before you
> have build things the first time using some other route such as "make
> html" and "make man".
>
> One could probably also make this logic conditional upon being called in
> a recursive make, which might actually work but will surely confuse the
> next guy who tries out something off the normal path.

I think that the whole idea of make targets building different things
depending on what you've built previously is confusing,
counterintuitive, and illogical. make all should either build the
docs, or not; trying to guess what the user wants is, IMO, nuts.

</rant>

...Robert