See this Debian bug (resolved, but not nicely):
http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=347564

And especially this exchange:
From: David Roundy
To: Isaac Jones
...
Date: Sat, 14 Jan 2006 16:26:25 -0500

On Sat, Jan 14, 2006 at 12:47:02PM -0800, Isaac Jones wrote:
> On 1/12/06, David Roundy <droundy@darcs.net> wrote:
> > When building darcs from a tarball, the documentation shouldn't be
> > built, since it's built during the make dist that generates the
> > tarball...
> 
> From what I can tell, the makefiles are set up such that it's impossible
> not to rebuild the documentation. I'll work on it, though.

Hmmm.  In that case the makefile is being silly, since we ship pre-built
docs in the tarball...

It looks like if you don't have hevea, htlatex or latex2html installed,
darcs just won't rebuild the html docs, so changing the build-deps to not
include any of these programs may solve the immediate problem (albeit in a
hokey manner).

> Since darcs_print.ps ultimately depends on the preproc executable,
> and since that binary is (presumably) not included in the tarball,
> when that gets rebuilt the dependencies of darcs_print.ps are
> modified and make is forced to rebuild them.

> That might not be the exact reason that the docs get rebuilt, but to
> verify the problem, just unpack the tarball, configure, and make
> darcs_print.ps... it goes through and builds everything.

Indeed, that's pretty silly.

> David, let me know if you can solve this in short order, otherwise
> I'll dig into it.

I'm afraid I won't have time for this.  There are some clever folks on
darcs-devel who might be able to work out a nice solution...

ijones, 

Do you find that this still an issue for you?  I haven't noticed an annoyance
like this when building darcs myself.

> Do you find that this still an issue for you?  I haven't noticed an annoyance
> like this when building darcs myself.

I believe this issue is for the packaged-up and released darcs, which
comes with documentation.  The issue would be that the makefile does
not detect this comes-with-documentation status and builds it anyway.
So it would be useful to check by doing a darcs dist and then playing
with the producted tarball.

Moot now that we've switched to Cabal.