From: Regina Obe Date: Tue, 8 Sep 2026 21:00:24 -0400 Subject: PostGIS 3.7.0rc2 released In-Reply-To: References: <001101dd3fda$7c978c70$75c6a550$@pcorp.us> Message-ID: <002001dd3ff6$99a3b390$cceb1ab0$@pcorp.us> > I think I understand better now. > > * details > > rsvg-convert is listed as needed, but configure.ac doesn't look for it. > It does look for convert, but doesn't check that it does what you need - I'm > unclear on if a working convert always does, or if it's optional. > Hmm that shouldn't be needed. My understanding is that it is preferred but not required if you have ImageMagick or GraphMagick Darafei can you confirm? I have neither locally. > * big picture > > Within the "make docs" top-level target there are a lot of subsidiary docs > targets. Some of them fall into "things a package ought to have installed", and > some seem more obscure. In packaging, what I want is a way to ask for the > things that belong in a package. If visual examples require things that aren't > compatible with packaging build environments, I'm ok with having those be > off. > > Looking in doc/Makefile I see > > ifeq ($(CAN_BUILD_COMMENTS),yes) > BUILD_TARGET += comments > endif > The comments build doesn't need visual examples. Are you having trouble building that? I can revisit that to make sure I didn't screw that up when I made changes to the visual examples thing. > ifeq ($(CAN_BUILD_PDF),yes) > BUILD_TARGET += pdf > endif > > ifeq ($(CAN_BUILD_EPUB),yes) > BUILD_TARGET += epub > endif > > but I see no such if for visual examples. Perhaps that's the problem, or > perhaps there should be split targets from top-level, or make docs removed > and documented which targets should be called, for things to be "make > installed". > > I admit to not paying attention to doc details; for years things have built and > the binary package has man pages. (I don't want to depend on > latex.) PDF and epub do require visual examples but those should be tested now and should be cleanly erroring if you haven't built the visual examples. For the most part we haven't been worried too much about docs as long as our CI that packages releases can build them. I think most packagers just use our pre-built docs: Which for this release - https://postgis.net/stuff/postgis-3.7-en.pdf and https://download.osgeo.org/postgis/docs/doc-html-3.7.0rc2.tar.gz Though I realize now I never bothered to link the html ones, probably cause I take it for granted people would just read them online or use the pdf for offline use which are always listed here for our supported versions - https://postgis.net/documentation/manual/ Users I suspect don't care about building docs if they are building for themselves and frankly our build chain especially now that we have translations Is very complicated and has always been complicated (perhaps a bit more so with the introduction of our (lets make sure our docs reflect our changes in the branch) which is why we have this new fangled visual examples build that actually tests our doc examples to generate the images. I wouldn't want any packager to waste time trying to get all the glue to make that work unless they have a pressing requirement to do so. It's best just downloaded and installed.