Re: [PATCH 135/147] meson: sphinx-build

[Peter Maydell]

On Mon, 10 Aug 2020 at 20:06, Paolo Bonzini <pbonzini@redhat.com> wrote:
>
> On 10/08/20 20:33, Peter Maydell wrote:
> > Does "build_always_stale: true" do what I guess it does from the
> > name? Does this mean we're discarding the makefile's approach of
> > only running sphinx if it's necessary in favour of always running
> > half a dozen sphinx invocations every build ?
>
> Yes, because the Makefile's approach is not maintainable in my opinion;
> *.rst.inc files were already not included in the Makefile.  I'll look
> into using a Sphinx extension to produce a dependency file.

Yeah, agreed that the makefile approach isn't great. (It lists
some .rst.inc files but we added more without updating the
dependencies, I think.)

If Sphinx can be persuaded to output a dependency file that
would certainly be the nicest approach; I hadn't thought
of trying that.

It would be nice to note in the commit messages where the
conversion has made this kind of "we're going to do it a
different way" design decision rather than just being
a translation of the makefile logic into Meson.

thanks
-- PMM