So I finally got the docs built. Couple of points which I think might be helpful to people building docs in the future:

You need to have sphinx installed in your working environment (native installation, virtualenv, conda, whatever). I did not see sphinx listed as a dependency online. Maybe it should be included in the HACKING.rst.txt file?
You do NOT need to have numpydoc installed on your system. Irrespective of where it is installed, the build process only uses the numpydoc package present under the sphinxext directory. I wasted a lot of hours trying to find which version of numpydoc was being used as I had it installed both in my virtualenv, and native installation; neither of those had the faulty import line.
After using `git submodule update` to get the latest sphinxext directory and numpydoc installation, the faulty import line in file doc/sphinxext/numpydoc/numpydoc.py needs to be changed. From
from sphinx.util.compat import Directive
to
from docutils.parsers.rst import Directive
Thank you Lars for pointing that out.
Finally, and this was my fault entirely, I had my virtual environment running python version 3.5.2, but as python3 or python. Calling python3.5 (as the Makefile was doing when I set PYVER=3.5) called the python executable in /usr/bin/python3.5, which couldn't find the sphinx module itself (as I didn't install it along with my native installation). Setting PYVER=3, or PYTHON=/path/to/python/in/virtualenv fixed this.

On 25 April 2018 at 03:40, Lars G. <lagru@mailbox.org> wrote:

On 24.04.2018 20:36, Aditya Bharti wrote:
> Regarding building the documentation, I was able to figure out that I
> needed to install sphinx separately. The HACKING.rst.txt file only
> mentions Numpy Cython and pytest as dependencies.
> I was able to get the make command running with `make html PYVER=3.5`,
> but I'm getting the follwing error:
>
>
> Could not import extension numpydoc (exception: cannot import name
> 'Directive')

Hello Aditya,

I had the same problem with my setup. I'm still a little bit confused
but I think the error was due to an old version of numpydoc trying use
an import that didn't work with new versions of sphinx.
I think got the old version with the git-submodules included in the
doc-dirctory (can be downloaded with `git submodule update`).

Anyway I got it to work by modifying the faulty import itself. Try to
find the file numpydoc/numpydoc.py and try to find the line:

from sphinx.util.compat import Directive

If you can find that line you may be in luck because replacing that line
with:

from docutils.parsers.rst import Directive

fixed it for me. I hope this helps.

By the way, perhaps it would be useful to extend the doc/README.txt with
a more thorough explanation of the build process and mention that the
submodules can be downloaded with `git submodule update`. I only found
out because I looked at guide for NumPy
https://github.com/numpy/numpy/blob/master/doc/source/docs/howto_build_docs.rst
while trying to figure out the build process myself.

Best regards,
Lars

_______________________________________________
SciPy-Dev mailing list
SciPy-Dev@python.org
https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/scipy-dev