Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason wrote:

On Wed, May 12 2021, Felipe Contreras wrote:

quoted

It's not clear what it was supposed to achieve.

It seems this used to make sense around 7b8a74f39cb (Documentation:
Replace @@GIT_VERSION@@ in documentation, 2007-03-25), but at some point
(I didn't look further) we refactored that and kept the "rm".

Actually it came later: 50cff52f1a (When generating manpages, delete
outdated targets first., 2007-08-02).

I'm not sure we should complicate the Makefile just because somebody
made the mistake of doing 'sudo make doc' a long time. Especially since
other rules don't have this.

  sudo make doc
  touch GIT-ASCIIDOCFLAGS
  make doc

Fails here already.

  asciidoc: FAILED: api-merge.txt: line 2: unexpected error:
  asciidoc: ------------------------------------------------------------
  Traceback (most recent call last):
    File "/usr/bin/asciidoc", line 6247, in asciidoc
      writer.open(outfile, reader.bom)
    File "/usr/bin/asciidoc", line 4633, in open
      self.f = open(fname, 'w+', encoding='utf-8', newline="")
  PermissionError: [Errno 13] Permission denied: '.../Documentation/technical/api-merge.html'

-- 
Felipe Contreras