"Joel Jacobson" <joel@compiler.org> writes:
> On Mon, May 31, 2021, at 16:16, Andrew Dunstan wrote:
>> However, not all buildfarm animals are set up to build the docs, and not
>> all owners necessarily want to. Moreover, we have provision for testing
>> various docs formats (PDF, epub etc). So I'd like to be able to build
>> and install all the world EXCEPT the docs.
> Why would someone not always want to test building the docs?
> What makes the docs special?
Toolchain requirements, cf [1]. Per Andrew's comment, requiring all
that stuff to be installed would move the goalposts quite a ways for
buildfarm owners, and not all of the older systems we have in the farm
would be able to do it easily. (If you don't have access to prebuilt
packages, you're looking at a lot of work to get that stuff
installed.)
It was a good deal worse when we used the TeX-based toolchain
to make PDFs, but it's still not something I want to foist on
buildfarm owners. Especially since there's no real reason
to think that there are platform dependencies that would make
it valuable to run such builds on a spectrum of machines.
We do have a couple of machines that have opted-in to building
the docs, and that seems sufficient. I feel no urge to make
it be opt-out instead.
regards, tom lane
[1] https://www.postgresql.org/docs/devel/docguide-toolsets.html