Re: Supported Sphinx Versions

[Markus Armbruster]

John Snow <address@hidden> writes:

> On 4/13/20 2:22 PM, Peter Maydell wrote:
>> On Mon, 13 Apr 2020 at 19:08, John Snow <address@hidden> wrote:
>>> I was curious about our actual version compatibility, so I did some testing.
>> 
>> Thanks for doing the testing.
>> 
>>> 1.6.1 through 2.2.2 all appear to work just fine, but produce a lot of
>>> warnings about a coming incompatibility with Docutils > 0.16.
>> 
>> FWIW, I don't get this warning with the stock Ubuntu
>> 1.6.7. The only time I did see it was when I'd managed
>> to accidentally install half of Sphinx 3 to my ~/.local
>> directory and I think it was the system Sphinx and an
>> upgraded docutils or some other weird combo.
>> 
>
> Yeah, it depends on what versions you pull in. I am using `pip` to
> install sphinx straight from PyPI, and the version dependency resolution
> opts for "the latest that isn't prohibited by the repository", which
> means that I am using (very likely) some cutting edge dependencies for
> an older version of sphinx.
>
> That's OK, it works just fine -- just a note, is all. It likely works
> completely quietly if you scoot back down to Docutils 0.15.
>
> (The requirements specify only Docutils >= 0.12. Eventually, older
> sphinx installations may break when Docutils 0.17 comes out unless you
> start pinning versions manually.)
>
>>> Conclusion:
>>>
>>> Required: >= 1.6.1
>>> Recommended: >= 2.3.0
>> 
>> I think that what we actually care about is the usual thing:
>> do we build OK with the version of sphinx-build shipped by
>> every distro on our support list?
>
> Sure; if any distro ships a version that's outside of what I laid out
> above it would be good to fix and check.
>
> We can also tighten and document the versions so if we do fall outside
> of that by accident, we'll catch it during RC testing phase.
>
> I'm using this to make a quick assessment:
> https://repology.org/project/python:sphinx/versions
>
> Fedora:
>     30: 1.8.4
>     31: 2.1.2
>
> OpenSUSE:
>     15.1: 1.7.6
>
> Ubuntu:
>     19.10: 1.8.5
>     20.04/LTS: 1.8.5
>
> Debian:
>     8/Jessie: We don't support this anymore AFAIUI.

Correct.

docs/system/build-platforms.rst:

    For distributions with long-lifetime releases, the project will aim
    to support the most recent major version at all times.  Support for
    the previous major version will be dropped 2 years after the new
    major version is released, or when it reaches "end of life".

Debian 8 reached end of life in 2018, one year after 9's release.

>     9/Stretch: 1.4.8 -- Broken at present!

Will reach end of life this summer, one year after 10's release.

>     10/Buster: 1.8.3
>
> Ubuntu LTS:
>     16.04: Dropped
>     18.04: 1.6.7
>     20.04: 1.8.5
>
> RHEL:
>     EPEL7: 1.2.3 -- way, way too old!
>     RHEL8: 1.7.6 [via CentOS8]
>
>
>
> We *might* need to do some surgery to support Stretch, and EPEL7 fell
> off the wagon entirely if repology is to believe -- it doesn't support
> our stated minimum of simply having the "Alabaster" theme, which comes
> in 1.3.
>
> For RHEL7 we *could* start using a virtual environment, which would help
> alleviate the wide version spread.
>
> ...are we opposed to this kind of thing? Has there been a discussion before?
>
> Targeting the native repo versions is nice (and we should continue to
> make a best effort there), but we *could* start offering a virtual
> python environment for the builds that grabs very precise versions.
>
> --js