Subject: Re: bug#40029: Preventing automatic python2 transformation of some packages

From: Ludovic Courtès <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 12 Mar 2020 14:04:35 +0100

Hi!

Marius Bakke <[email-masked]> skribis:

> 'python2-sphinx' is obsolete and increasingly a maintenance burden,
> because we need to keep special versions around just to make it build.
>
> The only reason we have this package is because it gets pulled in
> automatically when using (package-with-python2 ...) on a Python 3
> package that has 'python-sphinx' in inputs.

What about this evil hack?

diff --git a/gnu/packages/sphinx.scm b/gnu/packages/sphinx.scm
index 323d5b4457..66306e97fc 100644
--- a/gnu/packages/sphinx.scm
+++ b/gnu/packages/sphinx.scm
@@ -99,7 +99,7 @@
 for Python projects or other documents consisting of multiple reStructuredText
 sources.")
     (license license:bsd-2)
-    (properties `((python2-variant . ,(delay python2-sphinx))))))
+    (properties `((python2-variant . ,(delay python-sphinx))))))
 
 ;; Sphinx 2 does not support Python 2, so we stick with this older version here.
 ;; Remove this package once python2-pbcore no longer requires it.

The effect should be that ‘package-with-python2’ always keeps
‘python-sphinx’ unchanged.  (It’s a double-edge sword.)

Ludo’.