USE=doc has a very overloaded meaning. Meson doesn't ship pre-generated gtk-docs like autotools did, thus developers writing GLib/GTK+ apps may want to keep them around, as libraries move from autotools to meson. gtk-doc is integrated into various IDEs and standalone devhelp viewer, giving a concrete case when one might want to globally enable this (if using those IDEs until they don't have online gtk-doc support that's still in the works, offline developer docs, or matching system versions docs on purpose). Per-package USE=doc is rather inconvenient to manage.
Suggested description for global gtk-doc USE: Build and install gtk-doc based developer documentation Longer version idea: Build and install gtk-doc based developer documentation for dev- util/devhelp, IDE and offline use As the "Build" in the description suggests, this is only for when a generation is needed. In practice this means that it shouldn't be used for autotools based builds from tarballs, where the gtk-doc is already shipped - for those you just want a dev-util/gtk-doc-am build dep, which will make gtkdoc-rebase available that the standard gtk-doc autotools rules call to make the pre-generated docs pretty much equal to what you'd get from regenerating (mainly local offline links). In those aforementioned autotools cases, it's often questionable to have a USE flag (doc) at all for this when using proper tarballs. Most GNOME libraries have converted to using meson, thus building them is necessary to keep local developer docs available and thus keep IDE integration useful. Just always building gtk-doc would be distasteful to some, hence this global USE flag proposal. There will be dozens of consumers as I bump libraries for GNOME 3.26 and even more so 3.28 and 3.30 soon enough afterwards. Some are already there (including some not from GNOME), which currently use USE=doc for this. Instead of supporting disted tarballs with meson, they plan to do aforementioned online docs support for the API docs integrations, but I haven't heard about any progress on that, plus offline use use case will remain anyways. Mart
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