Re: Passing SPHINXOPTS is broken

[Mauro Carvalho Chehab <mchehab+huawei@kernel.org>]

On Fri, 23 Jan 2026 13:06:51 +0200
Jani Nikula <jani.nikula@intel.com> wrote:

> On Fri, 23 Jan 2026, Jani Nikula <jani.nikula@intel.com> wrote:
> > I was trying to get the regular sphinx-build output.

Just do:

	$ make V=1 htmldocs

or:
	$ ./tools/docs/sphinx-build-wrapper -v htmldocs

> > The monster sphinx-build-wrapper thing has this obnoxious and complex
> > logic of forcing -q unless you specify verbose in SPHINXOPTS. You'd
> > think those defaults should be specified in the Makefile. But no.

It is like there to mimic what we used to have at Makefile.

> > Anyway, setting SPHINXOPTS in the environment or on the make
> > command-line doesn't work, because Documentation/Makefile overrides it
> > to empty.  
> 
> Oh, it's more sad than just this. There is no way to use SPHINXOPTS to
> get sphinx-build to produce the regular non-quiet output (that the
> wrapper calls verbose).
>
> You have to use KBUILD_VERBOSE to make the damn wrapper not pass -q to
> sphinx-build. 

KBUILD_VERBOSE is the Makefile's env var that handles V=1.

>The wrapper appends the -q overwriting anything the user
> might want to pass on SPHINXOPTS. Which can't be passed anyway because
> the Makefile overwrites it.

It is like there to mimic what we used to have at Makefile: it was
was always passing "-q", except when called with V=1.

Thanks,
Mauro