Re: [Qemu-devel] [PATCH 00/11] Enable build and install of our rST docs

[Peter Maydell]

Ping! Thanks to Alex for doing low-level review of this patchset.
I'm particularly interested in high-level review:
 * is this the right way to be going?
 * if we committed this and then did a release with the
   docs as they are like this, would that be ok?
 * what's the most important next step after this?

thanks
-- PMM

On Fri, 1 Feb 2019 at 14:50, Peter Maydell <address@hidden> wrote:
>
> This patchset enables building and installing the various rST
> docs we have started to accumulate in our docs/ directory.
> It does this using Sphinx (which is the docs tooling that the
> Linux kernel uses). The series is not trying to take us in one
> giant leap to a brave new Sphinx-powered world -- it is simply
> setting up a framework so that we are at least building and
> shipping these documents and can gradually migrate other parts
> of our documentation to it.
>
> The approach I've used here is that we will have multiple "manuals",
> as proposed by Paolo here:
>   https://wiki.qemu.org/Features/Documentation
> For the moment I've only created 'interop' and 'devel' as we don't
> yet have any rST files for 'user', 'system' or 'specs'.
>
> One slightly awkward mismatch between how Sphinx naturally wants
> to work and our requirements is that when Sphinx generates a
> documentation set all in one go it creates hyperlinks between
> all the docs, they all appear in a single top level table of
> contents, and so on. But for QEMU's docs we don't want to
> ship the "devel" manual to end-users. I've taken an approach
> suggested to me on sphinx-users
> (https://www.mail-archive.com/address@hidden/msg03224.html)
> where we run Sphinx once per manual, and treat them as
> entirely separate documents. The config/tooling in this patchset
> also supports building everything in a single run, for compatibility
> with third-party docs sites like readthedocs.org.
>
> To see the results:
>
> What you get in the docs/ subdir of your build directory
> when you do a local build:
>  http://people.linaro.org/~peter.maydell/build-dir-docs/
> (follow the links to 'devel' and 'interop' for the two manuals)
>
> What we'll ship in 'make install' in /usr/local/share/doc/qemu/
> http://people.linaro.org/~peter.maydell/installed-docs/
> (should be same as the build dir except we don't ship 'devel')
>
> What you get with a standalone single-run docs build:
>  http://people.linaro.org/~peter.maydell/standalone-docs/index.html
>
> These use the default 'alabaster' theme from Sphinx. I
> also experimented with the 'read_the_docs' theme, which I
> do think looks nicer. Unfortunately it also requires the
> docs we install to include about 3MB of TrueType font files
> per manual, which is awkward licensing-wise as the TTFs are
> under the Open Font License and it's not completely clear to
> me that it's OK to ship those to use with a doc file that is
> GPLed. Alabaster doesn't ship fonts, which sidesteps both
> those problems.
>
> Other notes:
>  * this does not build the two .rst files that are directly
>    in docs/ (cpu-hotplug.rst and pr-manager.rst) -- we should
>    move these to whichever of the five manuals is the best place
>  * I do have some prototype patches which integrate the kernel's
>    kerneldoc Sphinx extension to parse doc comments in source
>    code. I haven't included them here because I think the 'devel'
>    manual is the lowest priority of the five. They might be
>    useful if we want to try things like building documentation
>    of supported machine models from in-code comments/etc, though.
>  * as noted in a previous email thread, the configure changes
>    now mean that building docs depends on build-sphinx being
>    available, so this is a new build-dep for --enable-docs.
>
> thanks
> -- PMM
>
> Peter Maydell (11):
>   docs/cpu-hotplug.rst: Fix rST markup issues
>   docs: Convert memory.txt to rst format
>   docs: Commit initial files from sphinx-quickstart
>   docs/conf.py: Disable unused _static directory
>   docs/conf.py: Configure the 'alabaster' theme
>   docs/conf.py: Don't include rST sources in HTML build
>   docs/conf.py: Disable option warnings
>   Separate conf.py for each manual we want
>   Makefile, configure: Support building rST documentation
>   Makefile: Abstract out "identify the pkgversion" code
>   docs/conf.py: Don't hard-code QEMU version
>
>  configure                             |   4 +-
>  Makefile                              |  78 +++++++---
>  docs/conf.py                          | 215 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++
>  docs/cpu-hotplug.rst                  |   2 +-
>  docs/devel/conf.py                    |  15 ++
>  docs/devel/index.rst                  |  21 +++
>  docs/devel/{memory.txt => memory.rst} | 128 ++++++++-------
>  docs/index.rst                        |  15 ++
>  docs/interop/conf.py                  |  15 ++
>  docs/interop/index.rst                |  18 +++
>  10 files changed, 430 insertions(+), 81 deletions(-)
>  create mode 100644 docs/conf.py
>  create mode 100644 docs/devel/conf.py
>  create mode 100644 docs/devel/index.rst
>  rename docs/devel/{memory.txt => memory.rst} (85%)
>  create mode 100644 docs/index.rst
>  create mode 100644 docs/interop/conf.py
>  create mode 100644 docs/interop/index.rst