On 2020-11-27 18:53, Tom Lane wrote:
>> 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.
>
> Check.
>
>> Backpatching to PG11 should be okay. Before that, it's different tools.
>
> Ah, I see there used to be more things in docbook.m4, so removing the
> file altogether isn't feasible before v11. But we could still drop
> the PGAC_CHECK_DOCBOOK macro, no? Even in the older branches, there
> is nothing paying attention to have_docbook.
Well, my point of having this as a mini test suite of the installation
still applies there, especially since it uses the old tool set that is
more difficult to install correctly. Those old tools have no network
functionality, so there is really no configure speed to be gained. I
would leave it alone.
In any case, note that there is also documentation about this at
<https://www.postgresql.org/docs/devel/docguide-toolsets.html#DOCGUIDE-TOOLSETS-CONFIGURE>
that would need to be updated to the new behavior. I think the phrase
"If xmllint was not found then some of the following tests will be
skipped." could be removed, since it referred to the DocBook test about
to be removed.
