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tools: the docserve make target doesn't seem to finally serve #34977
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For reference, the target code is the following:
Lines 778 to 780 in c2996ce
This is indeed Python 3 only (https://docs.python.org/3/library/http.server.html). I don't know if we want to patch it given the fact that Python 2 has reached End-of-Life and this is not actually part of the build chain anyway.
I don't understand why the command is so complex.
python -m http.serveropens a webserver atlocalhost:8000;-d $(PWD)/out/doc/apisets the document root to the generated doc folder, that option does not exist on Python 2 AFAIK.Python 2 users can use
make docopeninstead, maybe that would be enough for you?I see why this is happening now. I am running Debian 10, so the following line in the Makefile detects
pythonas Python 2.Line 4 in a1faa8d
Here's the reason why…
At any given time, the binary package
python3will represent the current default Debian Python 3 version; the binary packagepythonwill represent the current default Debian Python 2 version.
— https://www.debian.org/doc/packaging-manuals/python-policy/ch-python.html
For this to work for me, I would need line 4 to be …
PYTHON ?= python3… to execute the following.
Lines 778 to 780 in c2996ce
However, doing so would likely break all the other commands expecting
PYTHONto be the Python 2 binary.
We could add a new constant called
PYTHON3like this:PYTHON3 ?= python3And update the Makefile to use it for all of the newest targets
Python is being used quite heavily in the build tooling, so I wonder what our stance is on this. Here are Debian's goals.
Debian currently supports two Python stacks, one for Python 3 and one for Python 2. The long term goal for Debian is to reduce this to one stack, dropping the Python 2 stack at some time.
— https://www.debian.org/doc/packaging-manuals/python-policy/ch-python3.html💭 We probably want to ensure everything is working w/ Python 3 in the near-term.
This would technically fall under UNIX prerequisites, but somehow the
pythoncommand being picked up by the Makefile is the correct version (Python 3). Going to remove my new constant now since it just works™.Reacted by Antoine du Hamel- added 2 commits that reference this issue
on Sep 7, 2020 - added a commit that references this issue
on Jan 8, 2021 - added a commit that references this issue
on May 22, 2026
What steps will reproduce the bug?
Simply clone the repo and run
make docserve.How often does it reproduce? Is there a required condition?
Always.
What is the expected behavior?
To actually serve the static documentation pages.
What do you see instead?
Additional information
It's possible that this issue should be in @nodejs/help, but I'm somewhat convinced that this is indeed a bug in the Makefile code since this doesn't work using Python 2.7.16. If it's supposed to be Python 3 code, perhaps we should force that to make this work, but at the same time, I don't understand why the command is so complex. Shouldn't it just be the following?
Refs: https://docs.python.org/2/library/simplehttpserver.html
/cc @aduh95 as was the one who introduced this feature in #33221