Re: Improve docs syntax checking and enable it in the meson build

Hi,

On Mon, 16 Feb 2026 at 15:36, Álvaro Herrera <alvherre(at)kurilemu(dot)de> wrote:
>
> On 2026-Feb-16, Nazir Bilal Yavuz wrote:
>
> > I see your point but the suggested change actually doesn't affect C
> > files' compilation. They are still built although you make this
> > change, AFAIK this is how meson build works.
>
> If that's the case, then this whole thing is almost useless and Meson is
> being ridiculous. Hopefully you're wrong on this, and there exists a
> way to check the XML docs without having to have the whole tree already
> built.

Sorry, meson doesn't always work like that. It seems the --suite
option triggers building an entire tree. You can run the XML check
without building the tree using one of the following commands:

- meson test doc/sgml_syntax_check
- meson test --suite doc --no-rebuild

I am not sure if there is a way to prevent the full build when using
'--suite' without '--no-rebuild' before meson v1.9.2. This problem was
fixed in the commit [1].

I tested meson v0.57.2 (the oldest version supported by Postgres), and
it has the same problem too.

[1] https://github.com/mesonbuild/meson/commit/18c1ce716b8fe43cce090daa851b64cbbbdbd532

--
Regards,
Nazir Bilal Yavuz
Microsoft