Re: Passing SPHINXOPTS is broken

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

On Fri, 23 Jan 2026 16:28:37 +0200
Jani Nikula <jani.nikula@intel.com> wrote:

> On Fri, 23 Jan 2026, Mauro Carvalho Chehab <mchehab+huawei@kernel.org> wrote:
> > With Makefile, there isn't. This didn't change: it is just the same
> > behavior we used to have before the wrapper addition, after this
> > changeset (merged in 2022):
> >
> > 	c0d3b83100c8 ("kbuild: do not print extra logs for V=2")
> >
> > Now, currently it is possible to do that by calling the wrapper
> > directly:
> >
> > 	$ ./tools/docs/sphinx-build-wrapper -v htmldocs --sphinxdirs peci
> >
> > Here, "-v" instructs the wrapper to drop "-q" flag, but doesn't touch
> > KBUILD_VERBOSE, so you won't see kernel-doc debug messages.  
> 
> I'm not really interested in using the wrapper directly. I use make O=
> builds, and I don't want to and I should not have to figure out how to
> do that with the wrapper.
> 
> Again, it should be possible to pass user SPHINXOPTS to sphinx-build.

Agreed, but the problem is that, since a long time, "-q" was always 
aways added when V=0, and we don't have V=2 for docs anymore.

Unfortunately, Sphinx doesn't have a --no-quiet option. So, right now it
preserves the behavior it had for a long time:

- if V=0, defaults to "-q"
- if V=1, defaults to not use "-q", but one can add SPHINXOPTS=-q
  to keep Sphinx build in quiet mode.

What we could do is to add something like this:

	diff --git a/tools/docs/sphinx-build-wrapper b/tools/docs/sphinx-build-wrapper
	index 7a5fcef25429..13731b478822 100755
	--- a/tools/docs/sphinx-build-wrapper
	+++ b/tools/docs/sphinx-build-wrapper
	@@ -165,6 +165,7 @@ class SphinxBuilder:
	         parser = argparse.ArgumentParser()
	         parser.add_argument('-j', '--jobs', type=int)
	         parser.add_argument('-q', '--quiet', action='store_true')
	+        parser.add_argument('-n', '--not-quiet', action='store_true')
 
	         #
	         # Other sphinx-build arguments go as-is, so place them
	@@ -181,6 +182,9 @@ class SphinxBuilder:
	         if sphinx_args.quiet is True:
	             verbose = False
	 
	+        if sphinx_args.not_quiet is True:
	+            verbose = True
	+
	         #
	         # If the user explicitly sets "-j" at command line, use it.
	         # Otherwise, pick it from SPHINXOPTS args

Regards,
Mauro