Re: Sphinx version dependencies?

["Theodore Y. Ts'o" <tytso@mit.edu>]

On Fri, Jul 20, 2018 at 10:10:20AM -0700, Darrick J. Wong wrote:
> 
> Well yes, but it's the virtualenv workflow that produced build errors
> for Ted; that's what would seem to need fixing?

What would delight me if there was a fixed docutils and Sphinx version
which is the **only** thing which subsystem maintainers need to test
against.  If it fails for that version, then I reject the patch; and
if it works on that version (say, 1.4.9), and it fails on some other
version that a Distro wants to use for its hermetic build environment
(say, 1.7.5), I can tell them, "not my problem, feel free to send me a
patch that makes things work for 1.7.5, and doesn't break on 1.4.9 ---
or package 1.4.9 for your distro build systems."

I don't really care what the mandated version is --- although given
that Fedora and Debian seem to be using 1.7.5, maybe that's the right
answer, and too bad for the enterprise distro build systems --- that's
why they get paid the big bucks.  I just want to know what I'm obliged
to test against.

So if Documentation/sphinx/requirements.txt is the only thing which is
guaranteed to work, that's fine.  But it might be good to document
that somewhere.

						- Ted