Re: [for-5.0] docs: Require Sphinx 1.6 or better

[Peter Maydell <peter.maydell@linaro.org>]

On Wed, 15 Apr 2020 at 15:51, Daniel P. Berrangé <berrange@redhat.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Apr 14, 2020 at 01:41:14PM +0100, Peter Maydell wrote:
> > Update our needs_sphinx setting to indicate that we require at least
> > 1.6.  This will allow configure to fall back to "don't build the
> > docs" rather than causing the build to fail entirely, which is
> > probably what most users building on a host old enough to have such
> > an old Sphinx would want; if they do want the docs then they'll have
> > a useful indication of what they need to do (upgrade Sphinx!) rather
> > than a confusing error message.

> > Trying to get our docs to work with Sphinx 1.4 is not tractable
> > for the 5.0 release and I'm not sure it's worthwhile effort anyway;
> > at least with this change the build as a whole now succeeds.
>
> What happens if you try to build QEMU on   RHEL/CentOS-7 / Deb Stretch,
> with the new (unsatisfied) needs_sphinx version ?  Does the build fail,
> or does configure automagically disable the building of docs ?

As described above, configure will fall back to "disable building
the docs", unless you passed it --enable-docs, in which case it
will fail with the useful indication:
 Warning: $sphinx_build exists but it is either too old or uses too
old a Python version

thanks
-- PMM