How to build the GDB documentation from source?

Question

I've downloaded the GDB source:

git clone git://sourceware.org/git/binutils-gdb.git

now how do I generate the documentation from source as can be downloaded from: https://sourceware.org/gdb/current/onlinedocs/ ?

I'm especially interested in the HTML documentation, especially if it is possible to build a single page version of it.

I'm at GDB master f47998d69f8d290564c022b010e63d5886a1fd7d after gdb-8.2-release.

score 3 · Accepted Answer · 2018-10-23T16:45:01.757

3

cd binutils-gdb/gdb
./configure
cd doc
make html MAKEINFO=makeinfo MAKEINFOFLAGS='--no-split'
ls *.html

This assumes that you have makeinfo installed; that should be something like apt-get install texinfo on debian-like systems.

edited Oct 23 '18 at 16:45

answered Oct 23 '18 at 16:22

Thanks for this, but it failed with make: *** No rule to make target 'html'. Stop.. Any clues? GDB master f47998d69f8d290564c022b010e63d5886a1fd7d Ubuntu 16.04. – Ciro Santilli OurBigBook.com Oct 23 '18 at 16:25
Make sure you're in the doc directory and you had run ./configure before. – Oct 23 '18 at 16:26
Yes, I had done that, so you don't reproduce at that commit? make html on toplevel does run however, but is taking a while for some reason. Wonder if you don't have to run it on toplevel, and then maybe there is a way to select just gdb. – Ciro Santilli OurBigBook.com Oct 23 '18 at 16:29
I've updated the answer from memory; I'll just try it myself it if I don't get it right this time ;-) – Oct 23 '18 at 16:31
It works!!!!!!! The devs should put that on the website instead of the crappy one paragraph per page thing!!!! – Ciro Santilli OurBigBook.com Oct 23 '18 at 16:33
I've asked a similar question for GCC at: https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/493013/how-to-build-the-gcc-html-documentation-from-source-into-a-single-html-page – Ciro Santilli OurBigBook.com Jan 07 '19 at 14:54

Ciro Santilli OurBigBook.com · Answer 2 · 2019-03-18T08:26:29.553

If you run:

cd binutils-gdb
./configure
make html MAKEINFO=makeinfo MAKEINFOFLAGS='--no-split'
find . -name '*.html'

then it takes a while, but generates single page HTML docs for all Binutils projects, which is also convenient.

-j $(nproc) does not work unfortunately.

I found that GAS docs for example could not be easily built as GDB by themselves. If you try to:

cd gas
./configure
cd doc
make html

then it fails with:

as.texi:23: @include: could not find bfdver.texi

so there seems to be a BFD dependency.

Tested on Ubuntu 18.04.

2 Answers2