Re: [PATCH] build: Re-introduce an 'info' target to build a Texinfo manual.

[Maxim Cournoyer <maxim.cournoyer@gmail.com>]

Hi Peter,

Peter Maydell <peter.maydell@linaro.org> writes:

> On Mon, 18 Mar 2024 at 03:05, Maxim Cournoyer <maxim.cournoyer@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> This reinstates
>> <https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/qemu-devel/2020-09/msg09228.html>,
>> which was committed at some point but reverted many years later in
>> cleanups that followed the migration from Texinfo sources to the
>> ReStructuredText (RST) format.  It's still nice to leave the option for
>> users to easily generate a QEMU manual in the Texinfo format, taking
>> advantage of the Sphinx texinfo backend.
>
> As far as I can tell, we never committed that patch, because
> (as noted in the discussion there) we don't particularly want
> to generate texinfo output (and also because it was missing a
> signed-off-by line). So this isn't a regression: we've never
> generated info docs since we switched away from texinfo to
> rst as our source format.

I see.  For the record, very similar changes were contributed and
successfully merged into the Linux [0] and U-Boot [1] projects.  No
problems appear to have been caused by these in more than 2 years time.

[0]  https://lwn.net/ml/linux-doc/20221116190210.28407-1-maxim.cournoyer@gmail.com/
     merged with commit 1f050e904d

[1]  https://lists.denx.de/pipermail/u-boot/2022-December/502355.html
     merged with commit 7fa4c27a2e

> I don't think my position personally has changed on this one
> since your previous patch submission. Other QEMU developers
> are welcome to weigh in and disagree with me.

My position is also unchanged re-reading the past thread; that the
maintenance burden would mostly be on the Sphinx project rather than
QEMU.  The info target doesn't even need to be tested by upstream; my
opinion is that there's value in making it easily available for
downstream users such as GNU Guix to use.  The target is not built
unless 'texinfo' is available in the environment, so your CI can
continue not producing it, if this is preferred.

Of course, GNU Guix can continue to maintain it as a custom patch
applied to QEMU, but I think it'd be nicer if it lived in the QEMU tree,
potentially benefiting others.

> (If we do enable this we might want to see whether we need to
> set texinfo_documents in conf.py or if the defaults are OK.)

The defaults appear to be fine.  The output file is 'qemu.info', and
'qemu' is a fine name for an Info manual.

-- 
Thanks,
Maxim