[PATCH 1/3] docs: Makefile: avoid a warning when using without texlive

Mauro Carvalho Chehab
2025-09-29T08:54:07Z

As reported by Randy, running make htmldocs on a machine
without textlive now produce warnings:

$ make O=DOCS htmldocs
../Documentation/Makefile:70: warning: overriding recipe for target 'pdfdocs'
../Documentation/Makefile:61: warning: ignoring old recipe for target 'pdfdocs'

That's because the code has now two definitions for pdfdocs in
case $PDFLATEX command is not found. With the new script, such
special case is not needed anymore, as the script checks it.

Drop the special case. Even after dropping it, on a machine
without LaTeX, it will still produce an error as expected,
as running:

$ ./tools/docs/sphinx-build-wrapper pdfdocs
Error: pdflatex or latexmk required for PDF generation

does the check. After applying the patch we have:

$ make SPHINXDIRS=peci htmldocs
Using alabaster theme
Using Python kernel-doc

$ make SPHINXDIRS=peci pdfdocs
Error: pdflatex or latexmk required for PDF generation
make[2]: *** [Documentation/Makefile:64: pdfdocs] Error 1
make[1]: *** [/root/Makefile:1808: pdfdocs] Error 2
make: *** [Makefile:248: __sub-make] Error 2

Which is the expected behavior.

Reported-by: Randy Dunlap <rdunlap@infradead.org>
Link: https://lore.kernel.org/linux-doc/e7c29532-71de-496b-a89f-743cef28736e@infradead.org/
Signed-off-by: Mauro Carvalho Chehab <mchehab+huawei@kernel.org>
---
Documentation/Makefile | 13 ++++---------
1 file changed, 4 insertions(+), 9 deletions(-)

diff --git a/Documentation/Makefile b/Documentation/Makefile
index c60db1038c9c..f764604fa1ac 100644
--- a/Documentation/Makefile
+++ b/Documentation/Makefile
@@ -66,20 +66,15 @@ htmldocs mandocs infodocs texinfodocs latexdocs epubdocs xmldocs pdfdocs linkche
--builddir="$(BUILDDIR)" --deny-vf=$(FONTS_CONF_DENY_VF) \
--theme=$(DOCS_THEME) --css=$(DOCS_CSS) --paper=$(PAPER)

-# Special handling for pdfdocs
-ifneq ($(shell which $(PDFLATEX) >/dev/null 2>&1; echo $$?),0)
-pdfdocs:
- $(warning The '$(PDFLATEX)' command was not found. Make sure you have it installed and in PATH to produce PDF output.)
- @echo " SKIP Sphinx $@ target."
-endif

-htmldocs-redirects: $(srctree)/Documentation/.renames.txt
- @tools/docs/gen-redirects.py --output $(BUILDDIR) < $<
-endif # HAVE_SPHINX
+endif

# The following targets are independent of HAVE_SPHINX, and the rules should
# work or silently pass without Sphinx.

+htmldocs-redirects: $(srctree)/Documentation/.renames.txt
+ @tools/docs/gen-redirects.py --output $(BUILDDIR) < $<
+
refcheckdocs:
$(Q)cd $(srctree);scripts/documentation-file-ref-check

--
2.51.0