Re: Bogus "is either too old or uses too old a Python version" from docs/meson.build

[Peter Maydell]

On Thu, 25 Feb 2021 at 13:41, Markus Armbruster <armbru@redhat.com> wrote:
> Peter Maydell <peter.maydell@linaro.org> writes:
> > I'm not sure what could reasonably be done. The Sphinx test is just
> > "try building a trivial document with our config (which is what
> > enforces the version requirement)".
>
> This question is almost certainly naive: why is it necessary for the
> "trivial" document to include the truckload generated by qapi-gen.py

Because we want to use docs/conf.py, and docs/conf.py says
"these are the plugins we use" (by setting the 'extensions' config
variable, and so Sphinx will run the bit of the plugin that is "run this to
initialize me".

You could add conditionals to the conf.py to say "don't set the 'extensions'
variable if we're being called for the trivial document by configure",
but if there really is some problem with the user's environment that
means that those extensions don't work, we'd rather have configure
detect that and default to don't-build-docs, rather than configure
believe that all is OK and then the 'make' later falling over.

-- PMM