Re: [PATCH] Documentation: constrain alabaster package to older versions

[Jonathan Corbet <corbet@lwn.net>]

Vegard Nossum <vegard.nossum@oracle.com> writes:

> The 'alabaster' theme dropped support for Sphinx < v3.4:
>
>     0.7.14 – 2024-01-08
>
>     * Dropped support for Python 3.8 and earlier.
>     * Dropped support for Sphinx 3.3 and earlier.
>     [...]
>
> (Source: https://alabaster.readthedocs.io/en/latest/changelog.html)
>
> This manifests as an error when running 'make htmldocs' in a virtualenv
> constructed from Documentation/sphinx/requirements.txt:
>
>     Sphinx version error:
>     The alabaster extension used by this project needs at least Sphinx v3.4; it therefore cannot be built with this version.
>
> Raising the Sphinx version is not really a good option at this point,
> since 3.x through 6.x have horrible performance regressions (7.x still
> does, but not quite as bad).
>
> Instead, constrain the 'alabaster' package to versions that still support
> Sphinx 2.4.4.
>
> Signed-off-by: Vegard Nossum <vegard.nossum@oracle.com>
> ---
>  Documentation/sphinx/requirements.txt | 2 ++
>  1 file changed, 2 insertions(+)

So this is a little strange, actually.  Alabaster is bundled with
Sphinx, so there should always be a version that works; I'm not sure why
we have it separately in the requirements.txt file (which is
discouraging, given that I probably put it there).

I'll try to look at this (but not right away); do you have any sense for
whether things work properly if that line is just taken out?

Thanks,

jon