The libc crate is used as a dependency of the Rust compiler. Its build
system passes `--cfg dox` to all crates when generating their
documentation. libc's documentation is generated when the build system
is asked to generate the compiler documentation because `cargo doc`
automatically documents all dependencies.
When the dox configuration option is enabled, libc disables its
dependency on the core crate and provides the necessary definitions
itself. The dox configuration option is meant for generating
documentation for a multitude of targets even if the core crate for that
target is not installed. However, when documenting the compiler, it's
not necessary to do that; we can just use core or std as usual.
This change is motivated by the changes made to the compiler in
rust-lang/rust#48171. With these changes, it's necessary to provide
implementations of the Clone and Copy traits for some primitive types in
the library that defines these traits (previously, these implementations
were provided by the compiler). Normally, these traits (and thus the
implementations) are provided by core, so any crate that uses
`#![no_core]` must now provide its own copy of the implementations.
Because libc doesn't provide its own copy of the implementations yet,
and because the compiler's build system passes `--cfg dox` to libc,
generating the documentation for the compiler fails when generating
documentation for libc. By renaming the configuration option, libc will
use core or std and will thus have the necessary definitions for the
documentation to be generated successfully.
Documentation generation appears to be failing on master (https://travis-ci.org/rust-lang/libc/jobs/183483333):
```
Collecting ghp-import
Downloading ghp-import-0.4.1.tar.gz
Collecting travis
Could not find a version that satisfies the requirement travis (from versions: )
No matching distribution found for travis
```
Basically `--user` doesn't appear to take an option, so `pip install ghp_import --user $USER` makes pip think the user is a package that needs to be installed (in this case `travis`). As there is no `travis` package, it dies.
