Re: [PATCH] docs: Raise the minimum Sphinx requirement to 2.4.4

From: Akira Yokosawa
Date: Thu Nov 30 2023 - 02:34:03 EST


Hi,

On 2023/11/29 0:56, Mauro Carvalho Chehab wrote:
[snip]

> While I didn't make any benchmarks, I remember people reported
> poor performance with newer versions, so, without thinking to
> much, 3.1 or 3.2 seems a good candidate for the recommended
> version.

Well, I have different impressions on the performance of Sphinx >=3.1
and have done some quick benchmarks.
Here are results on a not-so-performant machine.

Benchmark of building htmldocs on Ubuntu 22.04 (after "make cleandocs"):

Sphinx elapesed maxresident (k)
======== ========== ===============
2.4.5 7m44.57 2806152 (parallel slot = 3)
3.1.2 11m25.28 1036264 (parallel slot = 4)
3.4.3 10m22.26 1067100 (ditto.)
4.2.0 10m16.53 1151220
4.3.2 10m06.07 1123432 (distro pkg of Ubuntu 22.04LTS)
5.3.0 10m18.73 1145524
7.2.6 9m53.80 1261736

python3: Python 3.10.12

Sidenotes:

1: Sphinx 4.3.0 officially added Python 3.10 support.
Sphinx 4.2.0 also works with Python 3.10.
Sphinx <3.5.0 happen to work with Python 3.10.
2: Sphinx 7.2.0 obsoleted Python 3.8.
3: Sphinx 6.0.0 obsoleted Python 3.6 and 3.7.


And here is a table of distro Sphinx packages:

As of 2023.11.30

----------------------------------
Distro Sphinx Python3
=================== ====== =======
Ubuntu 22.04 LTS 4.3.2 3.10.12
Debian 11 3.4.3 3.9.2
Debian 12 5.3.0 3.11.2
Fedora 39 6.2.1 3.12.0
RHEL 9 3.4.3 3.9.18
Mageia 9 6.1.3 3.10.11
openSUSE Leap 15.5 4.2.0 3.6.15 (provided as python3-Sphinx_4_2_0)
----------------------------------

So, I think Sphinx 3.4.3 would be a reasonable choice for
recommending.

HTH,
Akira

>
> Regards,
> Mauro