After generating the API HTML files we run xmllint in docs/html/*.html to validate the correctness. Since commit 0aa8536f14b08dfb5188d0bb3aba532680500d38 Author: Daniel P. Berrangé <berrange(a)redhat.com&gt; Date: Wed Nov 20 14:49:26 2019 +0000 docs: generate API reference pages for admin, qemu & lxc libraries we have many rules generating files into docs/html/. The xmllint calls for each rule are picking up files which are part-generated by other parallel build rules resulting in transient errors like: GEN html/index.html GEN html/index-admin.html GEN html/index-qemu.html GEN html/index-lxc.html GEN hvsupport.html.in html/index-lxc.html:1: parser error : Document is empty ^ make[4]: *** [Makefile:2407: html/index-qemu.html] Error 1 The easiest solution is to move the xmllint rules to the 'make check' phase of the build. Signed-off-by: Daniel P. Berrangé <berrange(a)redhat.com&gt; --- docs/Makefile.am | 11 +++++++---- 1 file changed, 7 insertions(+), 4 deletions(-) diff --git a/docs/Makefile.am b/docs/Makefile.am index 2a104bc837..0e43f382b1 100644 --- a/docs/Makefile.am +++ b/docs/Makefile.am @@ -311,16 +311,19 @@ html/index.html: libvirt-api.xml newapi.xsl page.xsl $(APIBUILD_STAMP) $(AM_V_GEN)$(XSLTPROC) --nonet -o ./ \ --stringparam builddir '$(abs_top_builddir)' \ --stringparam timestamp $(timestamp) \ - $(srcdir)/newapi.xsl libvirt-api.xml && \ - $(XMLLINT) --nonet --noout html/*.html + $(srcdir)/newapi.xsl libvirt-api.xml html/index-%.html: libvirt-%-api.xml newapi.xsl page.xsl $(APIBUILD_STAMP) $(AM_V_GEN)$(XSLTPROC) --nonet -o ./ \ --stringparam builddir '$(abs_top_builddir)' \ --stringparam timestamp $(timestamp) \ --stringparam indexfile $(@:html/%=%) \ - $(srcdir)/newapi.xsl $< && \ - $(XMLLINT) --nonet --noout html/*.html + $(srcdir)/newapi.xsl $< + +check-html: + $(XMLLINT) --nonet --noout html/*.html + +check-local: check-html python_generated_files = \ html/libvirt-libvirt-lxc.html \ -- 2.23.0