I got to the bottom of the problem after some debugging. The short summary is - I was using "devel2" flavor which disables doc targets. The problem was it only disables them partially not fully. So even though I was able to invoke the targets I got these errors and the guide is mostly built except for the flags refs. The long story: devel2.mk sets: BUILD_SPHINX_HTML = NO But we 'include rules/sphinx.mk' in ghc.mk unconditionally. Now, since BUILD_SPHINX_HTML is not set we filter out mkUserGuidePart from build targets: BUILD_DIRS := $(filter-out utils/mkUserGuidePart,$(BUILD_DIRS)) This results in an inconsistent state of the doc targets being available but not the mkUserGuidePart rules. So even though I was able build the docs partially I was getting these errors. -harendra On 23 August 2016 at 22:31, Harendra Kumar wrote:

Well, I tried 'make' and 'make all' (I suppose they are both same) but

that did not make any difference.

-harendra

On 23 August 2016 at 21:37, Ben Gamari wrote:

...

Harendra Kumar writes:

...

I see errors like this when using 'make html' in the topdir of the ghc

repo:

...

...

Hmm, it looks like there is a missing dependency in the build system. The users guide depends upon a number of ReST source files generated by utils/mkUserGuidePart. I'd guess that you haven't built these. I'll look in to why this is but in the meantime the workaround is just to `make all` before attempting to `make html`. Sorry for the inconvenience!

Cheers,

- Ben

I already fixed it - https://phabricator.haskell.org/D2470 . On 24 August 2016 at 00:39, Ben Gamari wrote:

Harendra Kumar writes:

...

I got to the bottom of the problem after some debugging. The short summary is - I was using "devel2" flavor which disables doc targets. The problem was it only disables them partially not fully. So even though I was able to invoke the targets I got these errors and the guide is mostly built except for the flags refs.

Good sleuthing!

I suppose the Sphinx html targets should simply fail with an error when BUILD_SPHINX_HTML is not set. The right place to fix this is likely rules/sphinx.mk if you are interested in fixing this.

Cheers,

- Ben