Re: Documentation building broken in CFBot

On 2020-11-13 15:58, Tom Lane wrote:
> Peter Eisentraut  writes:
>> On 2020-11-11 21:04, Daniel Gustafsson wrote:
>>> On 11 Nov 2020, at 16:43, Tom Lane  wrote:
>>>> I wonder if we should start passing "--nonet" to xmllint et al.
> 
>> How about this patch.
> 
> This looks like it probably works as far as the actual build goes, but
> could we change configure's call of xmllint likewise?  On a lot of my test
> machines (where, as a rule, I don't install DocBook; but xmllint may exist
> anyway), that probe for the docbook DTDs is the slowest step in configure,
> and not by a small margin.
> 
> Actually, I kinda wonder why we bother probing for that at all; it doesn't
> look like anything is done with have_docbook.

We could change the call in configure to something like

PGAC_PATH_PROGS(XMLLINT, 'xmllint --nonet')

But the unfortunate effect of that would be to make it harder for casual 
contributors to build the documentation.  For example, on a new MacBook, 
the documentation builds out of the box without needing to install 
anything at all.  That's a pretty big upgrade over 10 years ago. :)

I suggest if someone wants to turn off the current behavior, they can set

XMLLINT='xmllint --nonet'
XSLTPROC='xsltproc --nonet'

in the environment, and it will get picked up automatically.