> Also, a general comment, which is independent of this patch: I found the 
> documentation build especially not resilient, with a lack of clear error 
> messages when something is broken. Basically, if configure does not found 
> something for the doc (openjade, osx, xmllint, ...) it does not complain. 
> That is fine with me, people would not always want to build the doc anyway as 
> it is available online. However, the Makefile in doc/src/sgml overrides the 
> not found commands (ifndef JADE JADE=..., etc), and proceed to unhelpful and 
> unclear errors later on. ISTM that it may be more helful to do:
To be more constructive:
Maybe all commands could have a check counterpart added to the 
dependencies, so as to fail gracefully only if needed, something like:
  .check_XXX:    if type -p $(XXX) > /dev/null ; then touch $@ ; else \      echo "command $(XXX) not found"; exit 1 ;
\   fi
 
  foo: .check_XXX    $(XXX) ...
I'm not sure how to check for the docbook style availability though.
-- 
Fabien.