Re: make cleandocs issue: rm -rf /output when obj not defined

From: Jonathan Corbet <corbet@lwn.net>
To: pioneer695 <pioneer695@protonmail.com>
Cc: "linux-doc@vger.kernel.org" <linux-doc@vger.kernel.org>
Subject: Re: make cleandocs issue: rm -rf /output when obj not defined
Date: Sun, 25 Jul 2021 14:11:49 -0600	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <875ywyw3ui.fsf@meer.lwn.net> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <hMV_L3bAsgmBToxsfiYBJDxTBoLHll-1BOk7FvqialjmZFNDp14Bq69ddTVagVH49yViCM43-yFpZ39Kfr6geVK7ota0QhCDA4MaC_5vILY=@protonmail.com>

pioneer695 <pioneer695@protonmail.com> writes:

> In an attempt to get some readable documentation I cloned the git repository
> to check how the PDF format is.
>
> Entered Documentation and proceeded with:
>
> 	make pdfdocs
>
> which failed, so to start fresh, my thought was that:
>
> 	make cleandocs
>
> would be the next step before anything else. But, this resulted in:
>
> 	rm -rf /output

That's not good...

> as $(obj) for some reason was empty.

*This* would appear to be the real problem.  If you could do some
digging to figure out why that happened, I suspect that would be
useful. 

> Makefile for Documentation has:
>
> 	BUILDDIR      = $(obj)/output
>
> 	cleandocs:
> 		$(Q)rm -rf $(BUILDDIR)
>
>
> This should (at least?!) be:
>
> 	BUILDDIR      = ./$(obj)/output
> or:
> 	$(Q)rm -rf ./$(BUILDDIR)

These would break builds for a lot of people and are not the right
solution.

Thanks for the report,

jon