Re: Documentation building fails on HTTPS redirect (again)

> On 2 Oct 2022, at 03:49, Andres Freund <andres(at)anarazel(dot)de> wrote:
> On 2022-09-30 11:35:36 +0200, Daniel Gustafsson wrote:
>> Installing the stylesheets locally as we document solves the issue of course,
>> but maybe it's time to move to using --nonet as we discussed in [0] and require
>> the stylesheets locally? It's a shame that casual contributions require a big
>> investment in installation, but it seems hard to get around.
>
> docbooks-xml and docbooks-xsl aren't that big (adding 8MB to a minimal debian
> install).

Thats true, size wise they are trivial, but it's a shame we seemingly need to
move away from "you don't have to do anything" which worked for years, to "you
need to install X which you are unlikely to need for anything else".
Especially when the failure stems from such a silly limitation. But, that's
out of our hands, and we can only work on making it better for our
contributors.

> However a) we document installing fop as well, even though it's not needed for
> the html docs build b) the dependencies recommended by the debian packages
> increase the size a lot. Just using our documented line ends up with 550MB.

We have this in the documentation today, but it's not especially visible and
well below where we list the packages:

"If xmllint or xsltproc is not found, you will not be able to build any
of the documentation. fop is only needed to build the documentation in
PDF format."

I think we should make it a lot more visible.

> Perhaps separating out fop and using --no-install-recommends (and other
> similar flags) makes it less of an issue? We probably should work to deliver
> a more usable error than what just using --nonet gives you...

I agree with that.

--
Daniel Gustafsson https://vmware.com/