RE: [PATCH] scripts/sphinx-pre-install: add '-p python3' to virtualenv

[Bird, Tim]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Jonathan Corbet <corbet@xxxxxxx>
> 
> On Mon, 24 Feb 2020 18:34:41 -0700
> tbird20d@xxxxxxxxx wrote:
> 
> > With Ubuntu 16.04 (and presumably Debian distros of the same age),
> > the instructions for setting up a python virtual environment should
> > do so with the python 3 interpreter.  On these older distros, the
> > default python (and virtualenv command) might be python2 based.
> >
> > Some of the packages that sphinx relies on are now only available
> > for python3.  If you don't specify the python3 interpreter for
> > the virtualenv, you get errors when doing the pip installs for
> > various packages
> >
> > Fix this by adding '-p python3' to the virtualenv recommendation
> > line.
> >
> > Signed-off-by: Tim Bird <tim.bird@xxxxxxxx>
> 
> I've applied this, even though it feels a bit fragile to me.  But Python
> stuff can be a bit that way, sometimes, I guess.

I agree it seems a bit wonky.
The less fragile approach would have been to just
always add the '-p python3' option to the virtualenv setup hint,
but Mauro seemed to want something more fine-tuned.
As far as the string parsing goes, I think that the format of strings
returned by lsb-release (and the predecesors that sphinx_pre_install
checks) is unlikely to change.

Thanks for applying it.
 -- Tim