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(+)

OK, I'm going to go ahead and apply this, probably for 6.8.

I do think that we need to be thinking about leaving 2.x behind,
performance notwithstanding....experience says that it is just going to
get harder to support over time.  But that's not something to do in a
day, and this is worth fixing now.

Thanks,

jon