Confusing default behaviour of publish action

[lbm364dl]

I'm not sure if this is really an issue, but ultimately I would hope to see something addressing it in the documentation.

I was trying to follow the guide from here https://quarto.org/docs/publishing/github-pages.html#freezing-computations.

I had set this in my _quarto.yml:

execute:
  freeze: auto

I copied the publish.yml from https://quarto.org/docs/publishing/github-pages.html#publish-action. As I read here, I knew there was no R or renv installation going on here, but I expected this to work as the documentation says, because of the freeze functionality. However, I failed. Maybe this action log with debug on might be helpful. It gave an error Unable to locate an installed version of R..

I was confused because as I said I expected the R installation wouldn't be necessary. Then I tried again, this time including R and renv. See action logs. This time the error No TeX installation was detected. was enlightening, since I was clearly not expecting quarto to produce a PDF for me, just HTML files for the site. This is what helped me to find out this part of _quarto.yml:

format:
  html:
    theme:
      - cosmo
      - brand
  pdf:
    documentclass: scrreprt

I tried removing the pdf part, I ran the action again, and everything worked fine, without needing to install R or renv.

This was the confusing part for me. This pdf part is included in the _quarto.yml file generated by default by

quarto create project book mybook

If I run quarto render in my own computer, I only get the HTML version of the book. In order to get the PDF version I have to explicitly run quarto render -t pdf. But in the GitHub action, it seems the default behaviour might be generating the PDF? Or generating both? Not clear, but it surely worked after removing the pdf part in the config file.

Is this expected behaviour? Should this be clarified somewhere?