On Wed, 3 Dec 2025 at 16:37, Dr. David Alan Gilbert <[email protected]> wrote: > > * Peter Maydell ([email protected]) wrote: > > On Wed, 3 Dec 2025 at 16:20, Dr. David Alan Gilbert <[email protected]> > > wrote: > > > > > > * Peter Maydell ([email protected]) wrote: > > > > Surprisingly, this and -h/--help are our only two options where > > > > we provide a short synonym. I note that this handling of -M > > > > is not consistent with how we document -h/--help, where we > > > > print both on a single line: > > > > -h or -help display this help and exit > > > > > > > > But it would be trickier to fit that in for -machine and > > > > perhaps confusing given the suboptions. > > > > > > Right, that's one of the two reasons I kept it separate. > > > The other reason, is that I couldn't figure out how '-help' and '-h' > > > both got defined - why is the second DEF(...) not needed? > > > > A piece of delicious fudge lurking in system/vl.c: we have > > this hardcoded entry in the qemu_options[] array before > > the ones that are generated via the macro-magic from > > qemu-options.hx: > > > > { "h", 0, QEMU_OPTION_h, QEMU_ARCH_ALL }, > > > > So we recognize -h on the command line and turn it into > > QEMU_OPTION_h, the same as -help, but it doesn't result in > > anything in the documentation (we leave that up to the > > strings and RST in the DEF("help"...) section). > > Hah ok! I guess that fudge could be removed and make it the > same way -M works.
Yeah, I was pondering that. Also, we don't document --help in the HTML docs, only -h. -- PMM
