Sphinx pre v3 -- removing support

[Adam Turner <aaturnerpython@outlook.com>]

Hi,

I was pointed in the direction of this mailing list by Jani Nikula in
[1]_, who said:

> Thanks for the ping. I was heavily involved in the early days of
> converting the kernel to use Sphinx, but I haven't closely followed
> the recent developments. Basically I think I'd also be inclined to
> push for much higher minimum Sphinx version requirements than what
> the kernel currently has. The minimum at the moment is v1.7.9 
> (or v2.4.4 for PDF). It's difficult to maintain support for a wide
> range of Sphinx versions. Perhaps the best bet would be to mail the
> kernel documentation list at linux-doc@vger.kernel.org and Cc 
> Jonathan Corbet corbet@lwn.net to try to reach an understanding on
> the recommended minimum version and version ranges that makes sense
> for both parties to support. HTH.

This email is an attempt to do that. 

From Sphinx's perspective, we'd like to remove long-deprecated code.
What is a good solution here for both sides? The intertial option is
for us to delay the deprecation by another major version (removal is
currently scheduled for Sphinx 6 (2023-05), and we are currently 
releasing a major version every May.

Jani reports that you still require Sphinx 1.7.9 -- I have no 
investment in the documentation development of the kernel, but he
rightly notes that is quite an old version -- released 3 years and 9
months ago.

Please would you let me know if there is anything required on our
(Sphinx's) end that would let us drop the "pre v3" support gracefully.

A

Thanks,
Adam

_[1]: https://github.com/sphinx-doc/sphinx/pull/10471#discussion_r888962744