If you have ever run make htmldocs in U-Boot, you are likely familiar with the “wall of text” it produces. Between the standard Sphinx output, sub-make messages, and custom progress indicators, the build process has traditionally been very noisy.
While verbose output can be useful for debugging the toolchain itself, it is a hindrance when you are just trying to write documentation. The sheer volume of text makes it difficult to spot legitimate warnings and errors, which often get buried in the scroll.
A recent 5-part series in Concept addresses this. The goal is simple: if the build prints something, it should be something that requires your attention.
What changed?
The series cleans up the output in three specific ways:
- Enabling Quiet Mode: We now pass the
-qflag toSPHINXOPTSand-sto the sub-make invocations. This suppresses the standard “reading sources” and “picking up dependencies” log lines. - Removing Informational Clutter: We dropped the explicit print statement regarding CJK (Chinese/Japanese/Korean) font support in
conf.py. The functionality remains, but we don’t need to be told about it on every run. - Dropping Custom Progress Bars: The
SPHINXandPARSEprogress messages defined in the Makefiles have been removed.
The Result
The documentation build is now silent by default. This aligns the htmldocs target with the philosophy of the rest of the Kbuild system: silence is golden.
Now, when you run the docs build, you can be confident that any output appearing in your terminal is a warning or an error that needs to be fixed. This should make it significantly easier to maintain clean documentation and spot regressions in CI.
