The pinned version of Sphinx for 3.10 needs pkg_resources

[encukou]

Bug report

Bug description:

On 3.10, Doc/requirements.txt pins Sphinx==3.4.3, which needs pkg_resources. Setuptools docs advise pinning to an older version of setuptools.

This causes builds to fail with an opaque error: the makefile suppresses output of blurb help and sphinx-build --version, and assumes that any failure means that the tools are missing:

mkdir -p build

Missing the required blurb or sphinx-build tools.
Please run 'make venv' to install local copies.

make: *** [Makefile:51: build] Error 1
make: Leaving directory '/home/runner/work/cpython/cpython/Doc'

CPython versions tested on:

3.10

Operating systems tested on:

No response

Linked PRs

• [3.10] gh-145455: Constrain setuptools to a version with pkg_resources #145456
• gh-145455: Show output of blurb & sphinx-build version commands #145457
• [3.14] gh-145455: Show output of blurb & sphinx-build version commands (GH-145457) #145461
• [3.13] gh-145455: Show output of blurb & sphinx-build version commands (GH-145457) #145462
• [3.10] gh-145455: Show output of blurb & sphinx-build version commands (GH-145457) #145489
• [3.12] gh-145455: Show output of blurb & sphinx-build version commands (GH-145457) #145490
• [3.11] gh-145455: Show output of blurb & sphinx-build version commands (GH-145457) #145491

[hugovk]

This causes builds to fail with an opaque error: the makefile suppresses output of blurb help and sphinx-build --version, and assumes that any failure means that the tools are missing:

Yeah, that is annoying, I've run into it in the past. Perhaps we should replace version checks with something like which blurb and which sphinx-build instead?

[encukou]

See the second PR for what I'd do :)