Re: [PATCH v2 6/7] CI: Stop building docs on centos8

[Peter Maydell]

On Fri, 10 Feb 2023 at 16:01, John Snow <jsnow@redhat.com> wrote:
> On Fri, Feb 10, 2023, 5:41 AM Peter Maydell <peter.maydell@linaro.org> wrote:
>> On Fri, 10 Feb 2023 at 00:31, John Snow <jsnow@redhat.com> wrote:
>> This confuses me. We work fine with Python 3.6 today.
>
>
> That won't last - Many tools such as mypy, pylint and flake8 which I use to 
> manage our python codebase have been dropping support for 3.6 and I've had to 
> implement an increasing number of workarounds to help keep it possible to 
> test 3.6 via CI while also ensuring our newest platforms work as dev 
> environments.

Something somewhere seems kind of out-of-sync here. Either:
 * Python is deprecating old versions too quickly and
   dropping support for them too fast
 * CentOS is retaining old versions of Python when it needs to
   ship newer ones
 * Our policy for what distros we support is overly lax
   and causing us to try to support ancient platforms
   that we shouldn't be trying to support

because "use the system version of foo" should not be a big
deal -- it's not like we're trying to support decades-old
hosts here: Centos 8 was released in 2019, which is less than
five years ago.

> The argument I'm making is:
>
> - CentOS 8 is a supported build platform
> - All platforms *do* have a Python modern enough to allow us to drop 3.6
> - CentOS's repo version of sphinx is hardcoded to use the older 3.6, though
> - You expressed a preference to me in the past to NOT use a pip installed 
> version of sphinx in preference to the system version in "configure"
> - It's still possible to build docs on CentOS 8 after this patchset, you just 
> need a pip version.
> - We've used the justification that our build platform promise does not 
> necessarily extend to docs and tests in the past.
> - So just skip docs building for CentOS 8, only in the CI.
>
> If you believe docs in CI for CentOS 8 is a hard deal breaker, then I want to 
> go back to discussing the possibility of using sphinx versions from pip.

If Python 3.6 is EOL, shouldn't CentOS have shipped an updated
version of Sphinx to go with their updated Python ?

I'm not super-happy about dropping the docs build requirement,
but I guess it's probably the least-worst choice.

thanks
-- PMM