Question

I try to create documentation for a project written with Python 3.x. Sphinx is the tool I want to use and, according to the official site, its last version 1.1.2 is compatible with Python 3.1+. My OS is Archlinux, a Linux distribution which uses Python 3.2+ as the default Python package.

The installation and configuration is straight forward (easy_install -U Sphinx then sphinx-quickinstall) and I was never asked to choose between the 2.x or 3.x Python interpreter. But when I ask Sphinx to create the documentation of my project, my code is analyzed as if I wrote it for Python 2.x.

Is Sphinx ready for Python 3.x? Did I make a mistake?

Answer 1

I had this exact same problem last night, when I came across your question. — I am also on Arch.

I guess the problem could be a number of different things, but the solution for me was that I had the Python 2 version of the python-distribute package installed and therefore had easy_install-2.7 not easy_install-3.2.

I believe in my case the wrong version of python-distribute was installed by my attempt to previously install Sphinx from pacman (which installs version 1.0.8), so uninstalling Sphinx and all subsequently unneeded dependencies pacman -Rsu python-sphinx and then installing python-distribute got me the right version of easy_install, then reinstalling Sphinx with easy_install and the Sphinx installation works as expected.

If you have other things that depend on python-distribute then the process may be a little different. But start by just trying to remove python-distribute and work from there.

Scrap that last part. It’s too early in the morning and I wasn’t thinking straight! python2-distribute and python-distribute are seperate packages which I believe can co-exist. So, if this is your problem all you need to do is check you have python-distribute (not “2”), if not install it, and then ensure you use easy_install-3.2 to install Sphinx.

Hope this helps you.