I am not sure this is a good thing, because this should only happen when building from Arch. It might be a better thing to start distributing the .texi files for the libraries. Did you get this from the tarball? From your "fails on" values it does not look like.

Yes, this is with devo. This would be okay as long as spurious modification reports versus the archive just for rebuilding with a different system configuration, as is the case currently with snprintfv/snprintfv/printf.h, don't happen.

The bug indicates this fix was committed, but when I tried compiling from arch and CVS today the build failed at the same place. The patch still fixes the issue for me. Could this be committed to the main development branch?

"committed" means that it's in some archive; it'll be marked "fixed" when a fix is put in Paolo's archive. Check out comment #1 from Paolo for why this hasn't happened. If you want my fix anyway, use the attached patch, or you can cherrypick it (see `tla apply-changeset') from my archive. See my original post for the patch number, and my user page for the public location of my archive.

Er, next time I will try reading the whole post carefully before replying :)

I know this is a regression from 2.3.x where you didn't need all packages in order to build documentation. The problem is that Stephen's patch is a workaround, which "fixes" the problem by not building the documentation at all. If my build configuration changed, and the patch was in, I might start making distributions with incomplete .texi files (unless I noticed it).

The right way to fix it could be to use gst-package to extract the list of files, instead of relying on the .star file. For example, using the output of

$(GST_PACKAGE) $(top_srcdir)/packages/blox/tk/package.xml --list-files=BloxTK | sed s,^,-f

as command line flags to gst-doc.

fixed in master, will bring over to stable sooner or later