Re: BUG #5595: Documentation is not installs from VPATH build.

On tis, 2010-08-03 at 14:36 +0000, Dmtiriy Igrishin wrote:
> When 'configure' executed in a directory outside the source tree the
> documentation is not installs later nevertheless the "gmake
> install-docs" or
> "gmake install-world" (I tried to build with "gmake world" also) typed
> to
> install PostgreSQL.
> When 'configure' executed inside the source tree - all is okay.

I think I can explain this behavior. When building outside the source
tree, in looks in the build tree and then in the source tree for
documentation to install. This is done by looking for a 'html'
directory. When you already have an 'html' directory in the source tree
before you run configure, an 'html' directory is also created in the
build tree, because the build tree is created by making an empty copy of
every directory in the source tree. So then it thinks the documentation
is present in the build tree and installs that, but the directory is
empty, so nothing is installed.

We could fix this in several ways. Either hardcode exceptions for the
'html' directory in prep_buildtree, or only create directories that
contain a makefile, which could also be achieved by pruning empty
directories at the end of prep_buildtree. All of these might have other
side effects I'm not seeing right now.