I have found Doc/make.bat to be very useful, but I have hit a few of its limitations now and then. Thus, I have made extensive modifications to bring it much closer to the way Doc/Makefile works. Among the things changed in the attached patch:

• Use pushd/popd to make sure everything is done in the Doc directory.

• Allow variables to be set on the command line, e.g.:
  make html "PYTHON2=python"

• Set PYTHON2 and PYTHON3 variables separately; the Sphinx version and associated tools we're currently using want Python 2, which defaults to "py -2". Other tools, like Tools/scripts/serve.py (the make serve target), expect Python 3; setting the default PYTHON3 searches for python(_d).exe in PCbuild(\amd64), and falls back to "py -3" if not found.

• Set the HTML Help Workshop default path to %ProgramFiles(x86)%\..., if that variable is defined. (If I understand correctly, that variable is only defined on x64 installations, and in cases where it is not defined on x64, %ProgramFiles% silently copies %ProgramFiles(x86)%.)

• Convert target choice to a single for loop, rather than several lines of if. Anything not in the list falls through to the help message.

• Expand the help message to match the message given by Doc/Makefile

• Add the "clean" target, which does the same as Makefile

• Reimplement "update" to match Makefile (call clean, call checkout. I do wonder if maybe it should be done the other way around, though; reimplement Makfile's "update" target to simply update the svn checkouts, rather than re-pull them)

• Add separate labels for each target. The old method of sending everything to :build was very clever and kept the file short, but limited flexibility. It's also nice to get a message at the end (matching Makefile), which is much easier to do with separate labels.

• Add support for the PAPER environment variable in LaTeX building.

• Add coverage, doctest, pydoc-topics, dist, check, and serve targets. "dist" cannot be completed in the same way with default tools on Windows, so all it does is build html, text, latex (a4 and letter), and epub and copy them into the dist directory.

• checkout checks for the existence of the checked out packages before checking out

• build calls checkout before building, so you can go right to "make html" instead of having to do "make checkout && make html"

• Add support for SOURCES and SPHINXOPTS environment variables.

Everything seems to work for me, but I've only been able to test on Windows 7 (32 and 64 bit). I don't believe there's anything in there that doesn't exist in XP, though. Also, since this version of the file has a lot of labels, this patch does somewhat rely on resolution of bpo-17202. It should probably work without any changes to .hgeol, but that can't be guaranteed.

There are a couple of drawbacks to the patched version; it's a much longer file, and it does lose a good chunk of the elegance of the original solution. If anyone has any suggestions for regaining some of that elegance without losing any of the functionality, I am of course all ears :). In particular, I'm not a huge fan of having to have "pushd ." at the beginning of every label, but the only other solutions I came up with involved setting and unsetting a "DISALLOW_POPD" variable in several places, and a condition on the popd at :end, or forgetting the pushd/popd thing entirely.

I'm looking forward to hearing what anyone else thinks of this, positive or negative :)

+1 I would worry more about performance than elegance.

While this is debated, can you provide a mini-patch for at least 3.3+ that corrects the bug of trying to run sphinx with python 3, so that anything but 'make checkout' fails? I would apply that immediately.

Sure can. This one should do it, at least for anyone with 3.3 installed.

2.7 make.bat, which currently downloads sphinx v0.6.7 but not at least one needed file, does not work. See bpo-17412. I asked there whether simply updating the sphinx version, which seems to work, is the right fix. I believe this is currently the only different in make.bat between Python versions.

New changeset 9b45873e5a68 by Terry Jan Reedy in branch '3.2':
Issue bpo-17386 make.bat must run with Python 2 until Sphinx runs with Python 3.
http://hg.python.org/cpython/rev/9b45873e5a68

New changeset e45db319e590 by Terry Jan Reedy in branch '3.3':
Merge with 3.2: Issue bpo-17386
http://hg.python.org/cpython/rev/e45db319e590

New changeset 99e72eae35bb by Terry Jan Reedy in branch 'default':
Merge with 3.3: Issue bpo-17386
http://hg.python.org/cpython/rev/99e72eae35bb

I pushed the minipatch but did not add a news item as it may get superseded and will not affect anyone currently setting PYTHON.

Applying the minipatch makes the big patch fail to apply, so here's an update. Also changed in this version of the patch:

• README.txt is updated. Not all the changes directly relate to this patch, but there were some needed updates in there anyway. If desired, I can split those into a separate issue, but all the changes are fairly minor.

• Added *VERSION variables for each of the tools for easy overriding and easier-to-find, single place to update.

Terry, you're right about make.bat being very similar between versions. About the only other difference I saw was the removal of the line that prints the Python version in use, and the version of Pygments used. I'd be happy to make patches for backporting this as far as desired (assuming, of course, that it is accepted and is desirable to backport :-).

Any comments? Christian, I'd especially like to hear from you since it looks like you were the original author of Doc/make.bat (bpo-1472).

Here's a new patch to address Ezio's review comments, including more updates to Doc/README.txt, the addition of an 'htmlview' target to make.bat, and documentation of the 'htmlview' target in the Makefile usage message.

Terry, do you want to test and commit this?
Should it be backported to 3.3 (and possibly 2.7) too?

I do want to test this. If my regular machine does not get fixed soon, I will install svn on my current substitute to do so.

I caught a small oversight. This new patch changes the example in README.txt to make html "PYTHON2=C:\Python27\python.exe" (PYTHON->PYTHON2). Also, I added a bit of backward compatibility to make.bat; %PYTHON2% will default to %PYTHON% if it is set. Otherwise, %PYTHON% is ignored and unchanged.

After finally finding a way to check the status of the pushd stack, I found a bug in my patch whereby an extra directory is left on the pushd stack at the end of each run. As such, the version 5 patch changes from using 'goto end' to using 'exit /B !ERRORLEVEL!', along with some other changes related to that change. Also, because of that change, error handling is made a little easier, so I've changed around some of the messages and the conditions for printing them. Everything still seems to work.

For anyone testing this patch, I would suggest using the command "prompt $+%PROMPT%" if "$+" is not already part of your prompt. This will add a '+' character to the beginning of your prompt for every dir on the pushd stack.

Having looked at this again, the current patch is just far bigger than it needs to be and tries to do too much, not to mention being rather out of date now.

So, here's a much less ambitious, much simpler patch with many fewer ways it can go wrong (but also not quite as close a match to using Makefile). Instead of only allowing specific targets, the script now only specifies non-Sphinx-builder targets (like clean, check, help, htmlview, and serve) and assumes that any first argument it doesn't recognize is supposed to be a Sphinx builder. "htmlhelp" is still special-cased in the "build" target. Not listing all the Sphinx builder targets explicitly means that builders like "dirhtml", "pickle", or "json", or any builders added in future Sphinx versions will just work without our having to do anything for them.

New patch, fixes a typo bug in a useless statement (by removing the statement) and a few pesky tabs that made their way into make.bat. Also, a little better organization in the vars at the top.

New changeset c75a2282166f by Zachary Ware in branch '3.4':
Issue bpo-17386: List the 'htmlview' target in the Doc/Makefile help output.
http://hg.python.org/cpython/rev/c75a2282166f

New changeset c378c67c4170 by Zachary Ware in branch '3.4':
Issue bpo-17386: Update Doc/README.txt to list all targets
http://hg.python.org/cpython/rev/c378c67c4170

New changeset a172f26195f6 by Zachary Ware in branch '3.4':
Issue bpo-17386: Expand Doc/make.bat to be much more similar to Doc/Makefile
http://hg.python.org/cpython/rev/a172f26195f6

New changeset 2b2577d79e80 by Zachary Ware in branch 'default':
Closes bpo-17386: Merge with 3.4
http://hg.python.org/cpython/rev/2b2577d79e80