Re: Minimum sphinx version?

["Daniel P. Berrangé" <berrange@redhat.com>]

On Tue, Oct 01, 2024 at 10:28:50AM +0200, Paolo Bonzini wrote:
> On 9/30/24 19:16, John Snow wrote:
> > The current reality is that Sphinx 3.4.3 is our minimum because RHEL 9
> > offers that as the distro package and I have not dared bump our version
> > beyond that for fear of disrupting our ability to build docs on RHEL 9
> > without internet.
> > 
> > What I'd like to ask is: How adamant are we that we can build docs on
> > older platforms? Do we consider it part of our platform promise? Can we
> > bump Sphinx to a slightly newer version at the expense of offline doc
> > builds for RHEL 9?
> 
> Could we stop building QMP docs, if Sphinx is too old?  While at the same
> time keeping the same 3.x version and the ability to build man pages, which
> is the really important part.

I'm curious how much of SPhinx we actually leverage when generatnug
man pages ? Our content is primarily RST format. Would it be feasible
to just use rst2man for man pages, and just use sphinx for the HTML
docs ?

As I said in my other email though, IMHO, if the distro sphinx is too
old we should just auto-install the newer version that we need, as we
have set a precedent with meson. That way there's no need to disable
docs building

With regards,
Daniel
-- 
|: https://berrange.com      -o-    https://www.flickr.com/photos/dberrange :|
|: https://libvirt.org         -o-            https://fstop138.berrange.com :|
|: https://entangle-photo.org    -o-    https://www.instagram.com/dberrange :|