When we first converted our documentation to Sphinx, we split it into
multiple manuals (system, interop, tools, etc), which are all built
separately. The primary driver for this was wanting to be able to
avoid shipping the 'devel' manual to end-users. However, this is
working against the grain of the way Sphinx wants to be used and
causes some annoyances:
* Cross-references between documents become much harder or
possibly impossible
* There is no single index to the whole documentation
* Within one manual there's no links or table-of-contents info
that lets you easily navigate to the others
* The devel manual doesn't get published on the QEMU website
(it would be nice to able to refer to it there)
Merely hiding our developer documentation from end users seems like
it's not enough benefit for these costs. Combine all the
documentation into a single manual (the same way that the readthedocs
site builds it) and install the whole thing. The previous manual
divisions remain as the new top level sections in the manual.
* The per-manual conf.py files are no longer needed
* The man_pages[] specifications previously in each per-manual
conf.py move to the top level conf.py
* docs/meson.build logic is simplified as we now only need to run
Sphinx once for the HTML and then once for the manpages5B
* The old index.html.in that produced the top-level page with
links to each manual is no longer needed
Unfortunately this means that we now have to build the HTML
documentation into docs/manual in the build tree rather than directly
into docs/; otherwise it is too awkward to ensure we install only the
built manual and not also the dependency info, stamp file, etc. The
manual still ends up in the same place in the final installed
directory, but anybody who was consulting documentation from within
the build tree will have to adjust where they're looking.
Signed-off-by: Peter Maydell <peter.maydell@linaro.org>
Reviewed-by: Paolo Bonzini <pbonzini@redhat.com>
Message-id: 20210115154449.4801-1-peter.maydell@linaro.org
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