Hello,

never mind, I figured it out---apparently the build targets were disabled for the `quick` flavor, which I was using. 

It is quite confusing that we can be setting the same variable to different values in different places.   It would also be quite helpful if we modified the Makefile to say `documentation build target is disabled` or some such, rather then going ahead and building the whole of GHC, only at the end to inform me that it doesn't know what is `html`. 

-Iavor



On Tue, Oct 31, 2017 at 2:26 PM Iavor Diatchki <iavor.diatchki@gmail.com> wrote:
Hello,

sometime ago, I asked if it is possible to build just the GHC docs, without building the compiler.  I was told to just run `make html`.  This does not appear to work, the command seems to just start building GHC.  What am I doing wrong?

Here is the output I see, running the command from the root of the GHC tree.

> make html V=0
===--- building phase 0
make --no-print-directory -f ghc.mk phase=0 phase_0_builds
make[1]: Nothing to be done for 'phase_0_builds'.
===--- building phase 1
make --no-print-directory -f ghc.mk phase=1 phase_1_builds
  HC [stage 0] compiler/stage1/build/BufWrite.o
  HC [stage 0] compiler/stage1/build/Pretty.o
compilation IS NOT required
  HC [stage 0] compiler/stage1/build/PprColour.o
compilation IS NOT required
  HC [stage 0] compiler/stage1/build/Outputable.o
compilation IS NOT required
  HC [stage 0] compiler/stage1/build/Json.o
compilation IS NOT required
  HC [stage 0] compiler/stage1/build/SrcLoc.o
compilation IS NOT required
  HC [stage 0] compiler/stage1/build/BasicTypes.o
compilation IS NOT required
  HC [stage 0] compiler/stage1/build/Unique.o
  HC [stage 0] compiler/stage1/build/Packages.o-boot
compilation IS NOT required
  HC [stage 0] compiler/stage1/build/FiniteMap.o
compilation IS NOT required
  HC [stage 0] compiler/stage1/build/Name.o-boot

(then I interrupted it).

Also, in `mk/config.mk` I see this:
BUILD_SPHINX_HTML        = YES

-Iavor