On 2020-11-26 18:24, Tom Lane wrote:
> This came up again today on another thread [1], so I took a second look
> and confirmed that configure's test is completely dead code. So here is
> a patch to remove it outright, mooting the question of whether it ought
> to use --no-net.
>
> After removing PGAC_CHECK_DOCBOOK, there wasn't much left of docbook.m4,
> and what there was had little to do with docbook; so I chose to just
> remove that file altogether.
>
> This is actually entirely independent of Peter's patch. I'm tempted
> to propose that we could back-patch it and thereby save some configure
> cycles for developers, since it has no impact on anybody's build
> process.
Yes, this seems fine. docbook.m4 used to do more interesting things,
when we had DSSSL, and no catalog mechanisms, and generally more
complicated installations. It also served as a sort of test suite, when
if someone complained that they can't build the documentation, we could
look at config.log to see if their tools were installed correctly. But
right now it's not that interesting anymore.
Backpatching to PG11 should be okay. Before that, it's different tools.