Prohibitive sphinx lower bound

[ascillitoe]

In #258 (and version 1.19.3) the pyproject.toml was updated to contain:

sphinx-autodoc-typehints/pyproject.toml

Line 19 in 73c6dfe

dependencies = ["Sphinx>=5.2.1"]

Does this mean sphinx-autodoc-typehints is now only compatible with the very latest sphinx version? Is there a breaking change in sphinx that necessitates this?

[ascillitoe]

It seems this restrictive sphinx lower bound was first introduced as Sphinx>=5.1.1 in ccc75d2.

[gaborbernat]

Does this mean sphinx-autodoc-typehints is now only compatible with the very latest sphinx version? Is there a breaking change in sphinx that necessitates this?

This is the only version we test for, so it make sense to declare requiring this.

[ascillitoe]

😳

[gaborbernat]

Why would you not want to use the latest stable release?

[jklaise]

In the ideal world we would, but it's not that simple - even now we have some blockers with newer sphinx releases due to latex builds, so we need to pin sphinx until we can resolve it. In the meantime if there are improvements in extensions such as sphinx-autodoc-typehints that are not breaking changes with older sphinx versions then those are most welcome.

I think it's very natural to run on older versions of sphinx for many projects until time allows one to update - I wouldn't be surprised that many projects run sphinx 4.x with sphinx-autodoc-typehints. A restrictive lower bound on a dependency signals that there is some breaking change, but as I understand, it may not be the case here. Lower bounding the requirement to a very recent sphinx version without breaking changes being done or reported just means many projects will keep using 1.19.2 until they can upgrade their sphinx stack, and not benefit from updates to the extension in the meantime.

[gaborbernat]

The problem that as we add changes we never test with older versions so there's no gurantee at all that an older version of sphinx will work with the latest version of sphinx-autodoc-typehints. If it does work that's a happy happen stance.