Re: [PATCH RFC] configure: prefer sphinx-build to sphinx-build-3

[Markus Armbruster <armbru@redhat.com>]

John Snow <jsnow@redhat.com> writes:

> On 4/15/20 1:55 PM, Peter Maydell wrote:
>> On Wed, 15 Apr 2020 at 18:33, John Snow <jsnow@redhat.com> wrote:
>>>
>>> sphinx-build is the name of the script entry point from the sphinx
>>> package itself. sphinx-build-3 is a pacakging convention by Linux
>>> distributions. Prefer, where possible, the canonical package name.
>> 
>> This was Markus's code originally; cc'ing him.
>> 
>> (Incidentally I think when we say "Linux distributions" we
>> really mean "Red Hat"; Debian/Ubuntu don't use the "sphinx-build-3" name.)
>> 
>
> I'll take your word for it :)
>
>> thanks
>> -- PMM
>> (rest of email untrimmed for context)
>> 
>
> My only goal here is that if you are using a virtual environment with
> sphinx installed that it prefers that, so non-standard names need to
> come last.
>
> There's probably 10,000,000 ways to do that, hence the RFC.

My goal when I wrote the patch was to make the doc-building work out of
the box on systems where sphinx-build gets you a Python 2 Sphinx, which
does not work for us, and sphinx-build-3 gets you one that does.

I patterned the Sphinx check after the Python check: first the -3. and
only then the indeterminate version.

I won't object to a patch that makes things better for you without
making them worse for me :)