I wrote:
> * $(GENERATED_SGML) is removed by make clean, therefore also by
> make distclean
> Ergo, this type of failure is *guaranteed* when trying to build
> from a distribution tarball. This needs to be rethought.
I looked at this some more, and this time I noticed that the makefile
has
.SECONDARY: postgres.xml $(GENERATED_SGML) HTML.index
which puts the lie to the above theory. Also, in some simple testing
here I've not been able to reproduce the behavior of make wanting to
rebuild the HTML doc files when working from the alpha4 tarball. So
I'm feeling baffled again.
I can think of a couple of possible theories at this point:
* those reporting problems are using versions of gmake that have bugs in
handling .SECONDARY files.
* those reporting problems have re-autoconf'd. Since version.sgml
is declared to depend on $(top_srcdir)/configure, this would result
in a forced docs rebuild. It might help a bit to make it depend on
configure.in instead; though I'm far from sure this explains the
complaints.
regards, tom lane