README refers to a non-extant file

The current stable QEMU release (1.4.2-89400a8) README consists of a single line telling the new user to "read the documentation in qemu-doc.html or on http://wiki.qemu.org".  The distribution includes no qemu-doc.html, just a qemu-doc.texi.

qemu-doc.html appears when you build QEMU.

Having qemu-doc.html appear once QEMU is built and installed (in the source folder and in /usr/local/share/doc/qemu) defeats the purpose of the README, which is the very first place a new user looks for building and installation instructions.

The README needs to instruct the user to first run './configure', then 'make', then 'sudo make install'. The fourth bullet would then be something like "for further details, see qemu-doc.html or http://wiki.qemu.org"

The QEMU wiki which is mentioned in the README includes documention, and there is a link to qemu-doc.html on http://wiki.qemu-project.org/Manual.


On 7 July 2014 18:57, Stefan Weil <email address hidden> wrote:
> The QEMU wiki which is mentioned in the README includes documention, and
> there is a link to qemu-doc.html on http://wiki.qemu-project.org/Manual.

This is true, but I think it would be helpful if we specifically pointed the
user there for the how-to-compile-from-source instructions, since it's
otherwise not very obvious.

In fact, the "compilation from source" section of qemu-doc.texi is
pretty badly out of date in several ways. It would probably be better
to extract it into a separate COMPILING plain text file, since it's
also not very friendly to require somebody compiling QEMU to have
either network access or to read raw .texi sources (and conversely
if you've got a pre-compiled QEMU then you don't have any interest
in reading stuff about configure and make).

thanks
-- PMM


In 2020, the qemu documentation is now hosted online and doesn't require a build: https://www.qemu.org/documentation/

We are also very deep into a tree-wide overhaul to move our documentation onto Sphinx and begin providing versioned manuals.

I'm closing this as fixed.

This has actually been fixed by this commit here in 2015:
https://gitlab.com/qemu-project/qemu/-/commit/0a3c190098e1cb3da