Features/Documentation

QEMU's documentation needs some reorganization.

Ultimately there should be five manuals:

QEMU user mode emulation (docs/qemu-user)

currently in qemu-doc.texi

QEMU full-system emulation user's guide (docs/qemu-system)

the largest part of qemu-doc.texi

also covers qemu-img, qemu-io

parts of docs/

QEMU full-system emulation management guide (docs/qemu-system-mgmt)

qmp-commands.txt

docs/specs/vhost-user.txt

probably should include file format specs in docs/specs/

QEMU full-system emulation guest hardware specifications (docs/qemu-system-hw)

currently in docs/specs/

QEMU developer's guide (docs/qemu-devel)

the rest of docs/

the implementation notes in qemu-doc.texi

tcg/README

doc comments in the source code

automatically generated docs for Python classes in qemu-iotests and scripts/qmp

Choices

Based on experience from the Linux kernel, QEMU's docs pipeline is going to be based on Sphinx. Sphinx is extensible and it is easy to add new input formats and input directives.

Currently, QEMU documentation is written in a mix of Texinfo and text files roughly based on Markdown. Sphinx's native format is reStructuredText (rST). Texinfo input is not supported by Sphinx, but Paolo has a Sphinx (docutils) parser for Docbook; Texinfo is able to convert .texi input files into Docbook.

Currently, QEMU doc comments have never been actually used together with a actual documentation generator in mind, but are roughly based on gtk-doc syntax. We will probably end up keeping a copy of the Linux kernel's kernel-doc script. kernel-doc currently supports rST and Docbook output.

As a first step, we should decide how to evolve this into something more structured.

For text, the two possible choices should ultimately be:

1. Convert everything to reStructuredText

   Advantages:

   Disadvantages:

2. Convert everything to Texinfo

   Advantages:

   Disadvantages:

For comments, the three possible choices are:

1. Use reStructuredText markup

   Advantages:

   Disadvantages:

2. Extend kernel-doc to support Texinfo markup, and convert that to Docbook

   Advantages:

   Disadvantages:

3. Use no markup, apart from annotating fields, functions etc. using sigils (e.g. kernel-doc's &struct Foo or GtkDoc's %Foo).

   Advantages:

   Disadvantages:

Things to do

For now in no particular order:

• Prepare five wiki pages to work collaboratively on the manuals' table of contents
• Split qemu-doc.texi so that the bulk of its contents is included from small files in docs/