Building SBCL Doc

Building the SBCL documentation is easy. Except when it isn't. I had a heck of a time with it today. The build just wouldn't go. I even contacted SBCL-Help about it.

The instructions for building the documentation show up when the build is complete:

The build seems to have finished successfully, including 14 (out of 14)
contributed modules. If you would like to run more extensive tests on
the new SBCL, you can try:

  cd tests && sh ./run-tests.sh

  (All tests should pass on x86/Linux, x86/FreeBSD4, and ppc/Darwin. On
  other platforms some failures are currently expected; patches welcome
  as always.)

To build documentation:

  cd doc/manual && make

To install SBCL (more information in INSTALL):

  sh install.sh

//build started:  Fri Aug 26 21:23:22 EDT 2005
//build finished: Fri Aug 26 22:46:34 EDT 2005

I'm not going to go back and dig up the errors. Basically, the complaint was over missing texinfo files that are supposed to be generated from a shell script that is run during the documentation make process. There was no question that those files were indeed missing. So what was I doing wrong?

In my humble opinion, I was doing nothing wrong. So what did it take to finally make it go? Would you believe `make clean'? Yep. I guess GNU make got hung up somewhere and just needed to start from a clean slate. The sad thing is, I've had problems exactly like this before. I guess sometimes it just pays to start from scratch.