On the contrary, I'd have to disagree. I use the modref _all_ the time and having a local copy saves me hours of waiting for potentially slow network connections. That it's available by default 1) encourages people to actually look at the documentation and see all of the wonderful features available and 2) makes pike that much less mysterious.
The reason that the autodocs are now built is because at the very least, we need to have autodoc.xml available for external modules to insert their documentation into.
I agree that building the refdocs takes a lot of time, and that as an impatient person, it takes forever. On an ultra 10 it takes a good 15 minutes, about 1 on a new SF280, but that's beside the point. Perhaps it would good to have a checkpoint so that we don't have to do the join and layout each time even if the documentation hasn't changed.
This, coupled with a pre-extraction for the distribution sources might be a good compromise. Alternately, an optional install-without-docs target might suit as well.
Any thoughts?
Bill
About the autodoc, why building the autodoc by default ? Most users are not interested in building the autodoc anyway.
Bill thought it a good idea (exactly why you'll have to search the archives for). I don't think that we have to do this by default however.