Re: what should install-world do when docs are not available?

Hi,

On 2023-03-25 16:40:03 -0400, Tom Lane wrote:
> Andres Freund <andres(at)anarazel(dot)de> writes:
> > Right now if one does install-world with autoconf, without having xmllint or
> > xsltproc available, one gets an error:
> > ERROR: `xmllint' is missing on your system.
>
> > Is that good? Should meson behave the same?
>
> Since install-world is defined to install documentation, it should
> do so or fail trying. Maybe we could skip the xmllint step, but you'd
> still need xsltproc so I'm not sure that that moves the bar very far.

xmllint is the more commonly installed tool (it's part of libxml, which
libxslt depends on), so that wouldn't help much - and we now depend on xmllint
to build the input to xsltproc anyway...

> > If that's what we decide to do, perhaps "docs" should be split further? The
> > dependencies for pdf generation are a lot more heavyweight.
>
> Yeah. Personally I think "docs" should just build/install the HTML
> docs, but maybe I'm too narrow-minded.

Sorry, I meant docs as a meson option, not as a build target. The 'docs'
target builds just the html doc (as with autoconf), and install-doc installs
both html and manpages (also as with autoconf).

I am basically wondering if we should make it so that if you say
-Ddocs=enabled and xmllint or xsltproc aren't available, you get an error at
configure time. And if -Ddocs=auto, the summary at the end of configure will
tell you if the necessary tools to build the docs are available, but not error
out.

The extension to that could be to have a separate -Ddoc_pdf option, which'd
mirror the above.

Greetings,

Andres Freund