Subject: Re: [RFC v2 00/38] Improve ABI documentation generation

From: Mauro Carvalho Chehab <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 29 Jan 2025 16:41:57 +0100

Em Tue, 28 Jan 2025 15:42:00 -0700
Jonathan Corbet <[email-masked]> escreveu:

> [It's probably time to raise our minimum version again, especially now
> that current Sphinx has better performance.]

Last change was about one year ago, so it sounds fair to also
change Sphinx minimal version with about one year gap. What we have
currently is:

	2.4.4: minimal version
	3.4.3: suggested minimal version.

Looking at the relevant release dates, we have:

	Release 2.4.0 (released Feb 09, 2020)
	Release 2.4.4 (released Mar 05, 2020)
	Release 3.4.0 (released Dec 20, 2020)
	Release 3.4.3 (released Jan 08, 2021)

So, the ~one year gap is what it takes to raise the bar from 2.4.4 to
3.4.3.

In terms of Python, we're currently at 3.5:

	Python	Release date 
	3.5	2015-09-13
	3.6	2016-12-23
	3.7 	2018-06-27
	3.8 	2019-10-14
	3.9 	2020-10-05
	3.10	2021-10-04

	(according with https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=History_of_Python) 

Python 3.6 is the first one with f-string support, with is something
that most Python programmers use those days. So, IMO, that would
be the absolute minimal version we should pick.

Yet, IMHO, we should aim to be backard-compatible with the tools 
available up to a certain date (Jan, 2021) - e. g. we'll aim to
support at least a 4 years old toolset for documentation build.

So, I'm proposing to change the minimal requirements to:
	- Sphinx 3.4.3;
	- Python 3.9

By setting Sphinx minimal version to 3.4.3, we can get rid of all
Sphinx backward-compatible code.

I have already patches with such changes for it on the top of this RFC. 
Will send it shortly as RFC, aiming to send the final version after -rc1.

Thanks,
Mauro