On Wed, Jul 3, 2024 at 2:06 PM John Snow <jsnow@redhat.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Jul 3, 2024, 4:00 AM Paolo Bonzini <pbonzini@redhat.com> wrote:
>> On 7/2/24 21:59, John Snow wrote:
>> > With RHEL 8 support retired (It's been two years today since RHEL 9
>> > came out), our very oldest build platform version of Sphinx is now
>> > 3.4.3; and keeping backwards compatibility for versions as old as v1.6
>> > when using domain extensions is a lot of work we don't need to do.
>>
>> Technically that's unrelated: thanks to your venv work, :) builds on
>> RHEL 8 / CentOS Stream 8 do not pick the platform Sphinx, because it
>> runs under Python 3.6. Therefore the version included in RHEL 8 does
>> not matter for picking the minimum supported Sphinx version.
>
> I think I can't mandate 4.x because of RHEL 9 builds though, and offline requirements.
Offline requirements are not a problem; on RHEL 8 you just have to
install with pip in order to build docs offline. But yes, RHEL 9 is
still using platform Python and therefore 3.4.3 remains the limit even
after we stop supporting bullseye.
To be clear I mean offline, isolated RPM builds under RHEL9 where I don't think we can utilize PyPI at all; and vendoring Sphinx is I think not a practical option due to the number of dependencies and non-pure Python deps.
It's not a problem for developer workflow, just downstream packaging.
Luckily OpenSUSE offers newer Sphinx, but RHEL doesn't yet. Maybe that can be rectified eventually - possibly after 3.8 is EOL and there is increased demand for newer Python packages to be made available in RHEL... but not yet, today.
Paolo
Thanks for the ack O:-)