Re: [Qemu-devel] [RFC PATCH 4/4] qemu-options: Do not show -enable-kvm and -enable-hax in the docs anymore

["Daniel P. Berrangé" <berrange@redhat.com>]

On Wed, Jun 13, 2018 at 02:38:40PM +0100, Stefan Hajnoczi wrote:
> On Wed, Jun 13, 2018 at 07:05:21AM +0200, Thomas Huth wrote:
> > We've got three ways of enabling an accelerator: -machine accel=xyz,
> > -accel xyz and -enable-xyz. For new QEMU users, this must be very
> > confusing ("Which one do I have to use? Is there a difference between
> > the options?"). While -enable-kvm was useful in the past, there is no
> > real good reason for using it anymore today ("-accel kvm" is even less
> > to type than "-enable-kvm"), so let's decrease the confusing amount of
> > options in our documenation a little bit by removing the -enable-xyz
> > here. Note that the option itself is neither removed nor marked as
> > deprecated - since -enable-kvm is likely used in a lot of scripts and
> > since its code is easy to maintain, we should keep it around to avoid
> > to break old setups.
> > 
> > Signed-off-by: Thomas Huth <thuth@redhat.com>
> > ---
> >  PS: I guess Paolo won't like this patch ... let's try it anyway ;-)
> 
> It's widely used and we're removing the documentation for it?!  That is
> likely to cause issues for new users who refer to the man page to
> understand the QEMU command-lines they see online, in scripts, etc.

Agreed, this is a very bad idea. Any option that is accepted by QEMU,
but not documented is a bug that must be fixed. IOW removing docs
is creating bugs.

If we want to help users understand why we have -enable-kvm, just
make the docs say that it is syntactic for '-machine accel=kvm'.
Users can decide for themselves whether they want to switch to
the more verbose way or not

Regards,
Daniel
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