Re: [PATCH v2 0/2] DEFAULT_DOC_TARGET

On Thu, Jan 03, 2013 at 11:05:18AM -0800, Junio C Hamano wrote:

This allows things like:

  $ DEFAULT_DOC_TARGET=html make doc
  $ DEFAULT_DOC_INSTALL_TARGET=html make install-doc

on a platform that does not have manpage viewer.  Which is not very
useful, given that you can already say

  $ make install-html

on such a platform, and these install-$format targets will not go
away.

I think the usefulness is that it can be set by default for a particular
uname, so people on Windows can just type "make install-doc" without
having to care about setting anything (though to be honest, I do not
even know what they build by default; maybe they do build manpages).
Except that in the original thread:

  http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/207193/focus=207201

it became clear that to do that we would also want to hoist the uname
automagic defaults into their own file that could be read from
Documentation/Makefile.

The real motivation behind this was to let me say:

  $ git checkout $some_old_fork_point
  $ DEFAULT_DOC_TARGET=git-push.1 make doc

while updating the sources to the documentation for the maintainance
track, without having to format everything else that is different
between the old fork point and the primary branch I usually work on.

I still don't see how this is any advantage over:

  make -C Documentation git-push.1

The first one was discussed some time ago on the list and all the
fixes mentioned on the thread already squashed in.  The second one
is merely for completeness.

I wonder...do we really need DEFAULT_DOC_INSTALL_TARGET? Why isn't it
the same as DEFAULT_DOC_TARGET? I realize that right now we build html
and manpages by default, but only install man. But then why do we bother
building html then?

-Peff