[docs] [issue35605] backported patch requires new sphinx, minimum sphinx version was not bumped

[Anthony Sottile]

New submission from Anthony Sottile <asottile at umich.edu>:

Noticed this while packaging 3.6.8 for deadsnakes (ubuntu ppa)

This patch: https://github.com/python/cpython/pull/11251

Requires a version of sphinx where `sphinx.util.logging.getLogger` is available.  It appears that the first version which that was available was 1.6: https://github.com/sphinx-doc/sphinx/commit/6d4e6454093953943e79d4db6efeb17390870e62#diff-db360b033c6011189d978db1a4b7dcb7

For example, on ubuntu xenial (16.04) the newest packaged version of python3-sphinx available is 1.3.6 (released 2016-02) which satisfies the "minimum version": https://github.com/python/cpython/blob/3c6b436a57893dd1fae4e072768f41a199076252/Doc/conf.py#L36-L37

I hacked around it in this case by just using `logging.getLogger`: https://github.com/deadsnakes/python3.6/commit/9ba2234f35087a4bf67e3aecf2bd8dd0e3f67186

I'm not sure what the right answer is here, bumping the minimum version will make it _harder_ for packagers -- though I understand continuing to support old (2 years ago) things can be cumbersome.

----------
assignee: docs at python
components: Build, Documentation
messages: 332665
nosy: Anthony Sottile, docs at python
priority: normal
severity: normal
status: open
title: backported patch requires new sphinx, minimum sphinx version was not bumped
versions: Python 3.6

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