Documentation-only builds shouldn't fail because of missing dependencies

[kornelski]

https://github.com/onur/docs.rs/issues/147 (it's not exactly CI, but in the family of "the build fails on someone else's headless computer")

cargo doc runs a full build, and fails if any build.rs script fails. This is a problem for docs.rs, because it can't build documentation for -sys crates that usually require a specific library installed on the system (e.g. ffmpeg-sys won't build without a specific version of ffmpeg, so it doesn't get documented).

At very least there should be some cfg(doc) or env variable to detect docs build, so that tricky bits not relevant to the documentation can be skipped. Maybe Cargo/rustdoc could be instructed to plow through build failures and document as much as it can?

[epage]

Let me see what can be turned into something tangible for crate-ci org to work on for this. Our focus is more on streamlining crate management through documentation, tooling, and advocating for fixing problems.

This sounds like a problem within existing tooling and you've opened a related issue with the respective tool. So is this more seeking to raise awareness for getting help advocating for your problem?

[kornelski]

OK, that's probably out of scope.