Re: Python 2.7 support and automarkup.py - Was: Re: [PATCH v2 1/5] docs: automarkup.py: Use new C roles in Sphinx 3

[Matthew Wilcox]

On Fri, Oct 30, 2020 at 08:14:40AM -0600, Jonathan Corbet wrote:
> On Fri, 30 Oct 2020 15:10:26 +0100
> Mauro Carvalho Chehab <mchehab+huawei@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> 
> > I see a few alternatives:
> > 
> > 1) fix automarkup.py for it to work again with python 2.7;
> > 
> > 2) conf.py could gain some logic to disable automarkup with
> >    Python < 3;
> > 
> > 3) scripts/sphinx-pre-install already detects Python version. 
> >    It should likely be easy to ask the user to use python 3.x,
> >    if an older version is detected.
> > 
> > Doing (1) or (2) will require an additional step when we raise
> > the bar for Python version.
> 
> We haven't dropped support for Python 2 yet, so this constitutes a
> regression.  My own approach would be something like this at the top of
> automarkup.py:
> 
> 	if python2:
> 	    ascii = 0
> 	else:
> 	    ascii = re.ASCII
> 
> ...then s/re.ASCII/ascii/ throughout.  I can probably put together
> something later this morning.

Could we have a warning somewhere that python 2.7 is going to produce
inferior docs?

Alternatively, https://docs.python.org/2/library/re.html suggests
using "The third-party regex module".