On Fri, Jul 20, 2018 at 03:45:37PM +0200, Markus Heiser wrote: > Am Freitag, den 20.07.2018, 09:12 -0400 schrieb Theodore Y. Ts'o: > > I'm not entirely sure what's the best approach. Right now I just want > > to understand --- do I have to make ext4.rst work against one, or many > > versions of Sphinx? And which version(s) of Sphinx do I need to > > concern myself with? If that turns out to be an onerous burden, I'm > > sure I won't be the only person complaining. :-) > > In that case ... > > > But when I did that, Sphinx had heartburn over the ext4.rst file. > > > > ./include/linux/spi/spi.h:373: ERROR: Unexpected indentation. > > /usr/projects/linux/ext4/Documentation/filesystems/ext4/ext4.rst:139: ERROR: Malformed table. > > Column span alignment problem in table line 5. > > ... its clear; the table was malformed. A markup error which is not detected > by older versions of docutils (very special case). ... except that newer verions are A-OK with it. Apparently 1.3.x was OK with it, and 1.6.x and 1.7.x were ok with it. ***ONLY*** Sphinx 1.4.9 blew up on the "malformed table". So in this case, Darrick has come up with a patch that is makes it OK with 1.4.9 without breaking on 1.7.5 --- and obviously, doing something that makes it broadly portable is the right thing. I'm asking a larger question, which is moving forward, which is more important? Make it work with Sphinx 1.4.9? Or making it Sphinx work with Sphinx 1.7.5? And should we change Documentation/sphinx/requirements.txt to require something newer, such as Sphinx 1.7.5? And should we require that Ubuntu 18.04 which is using Sphinx 1.6.8 use a virtualenv and use download Sphinx 1.6.8? My understanding that the Sphinx developers make no guarantees that if we follow some external, version-indepedent spec, that it will work on Sphinx version N, as well as Sphinx version N+1. (In the ideal world, if there was such an independent spec for .rst format files, and a compliant .rst file doesn't work for Sphinx version N, it's a bug, and we should expect somebody --- perhaps the Distro's --- to backport the fix from Sphinx version N+1 to Sphinx version N.) E.g., is there an equivalent for ANSI C 1999 standard for .rst files? - Ted
