How to build documentation using meson?

[whoami730]

How to build sage documentation for development using meson?
Following command does not work -

meson compile -C builddir doc-html

This command as per here also fails -

$ ./sage --docbuild reference html
python3: No module named sage_docbuild

[tobiasdiez]

See #39973

[user202729]

for meson compile -C builddir doc-html, note that builddir is the build directory.

If pip is used as above with --editable, builddir is set to be build/cp[Python major version][Python minor version], such as build/cp311.

https://doc.sagemath.org/html/en/installation//meson.html

(do you think changing builddir to ⟨builddir⟩ is useful?)

---

for

$ ./sage --docbuild reference html

the last time I try doing something like this is #39279 (comment) and I think it worked back then, to fix the no module named sage_docbuild issue you can

cd pkgs/sage-docbuild/
pip install .
cd ../..

then I think you're supposed to do something like

• sage --docbuild reference html or
• sage --docbuild reference_top html or
• sage --docbuild reference_top pdf?

Not sure, I'm getting some errors.

there's also sage --docbuild --help, though several functionalities appear to be broken at the moment. for example sage --docbuild -D gives

NameError: name 'get_documents' is not defined. Did you mean: 'help_documents'?

on the other hand, e.g. sage --docbuild reference/stats pdf works too.

pull requests welcome (it would be helpful if someone can fix the issue).

[user202729]

maybe another useful feature to have is to migrate CI build-doc-pdf to meson, since the current one still uses the old builder and is somewhat clunky.