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

[Akira Yokosawa]

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