GH-35906: [Docs] Enable building the documentation without having pyarrow installed

[AlenkaF]

Rationale for this change

Ease the process of building the documentation for dev purposes.

What changes are included in this PR?

conf.py is updated in a way to permit having pyarrow not installed (from source or as a binary).
In case pyarrow is not available:

• docs/source/python folder will be excluded from the build of the documentation
• version of the documentation will be set to '0.0.0-local-docs-build'

I have tested the changes for cases when:

• pyarrow was built from source
• without pyarrow
• pyarrow was installed from PyPI, version 12.0.0

with building all of the docs and only format/developers sections.

• Closes: [Docs] Enable the build of the documentation without pyarrow built from source #35906

[github-actions]

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See also:

• Other pull requests
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[github-actions]

⚠️ GitHub issue #35906 has been automatically assigned in GitHub to PR creator.

[jorisvandenbossche]

Thanks for the PR!

One question: this is excluding the full of the python docs. Longer term, should we try to only exclude the API docs? (there are currently a few files in the python/ directory that require pyarrow to be installed to run the examples in the ipython directives, but many files also don't have this, and could in theory be built without pyarrow being installed)

[AlenkaF]

One question: this is excluding the full of the python docs. Longer term, should we try to only exclude the API docs? (there are currently a few files in the python/ directory that require pyarrow to be installed to run the examples in the ipython directives, but many files also don't have this, and could in theory be built without pyarrow being installed)

Excluding files with ipython directives ('python/data.rst', 'python/dataset.rst', 'python/getstarted.rst', 'python/ipc.rst', 'python/memory.rst', 'python/pandas.rst', 'python/parquet.rst') and 'python/filesystems_deprecated.rst' with the HDFS API autosummary list, I still get an error

Sphinx parallel build error:
ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'pyarrow.lib'
make: *** [html] Error 2

and I think it is connected to all 33 .rst files that have .. currentmodule:: pyarrow (but am not sure). At this point I decided this doesn't make much sense and it is better just to exclude full of the python docs.

I can try a bit further to see where I get, if you think this would be beneficial? But I do think if one is building the docs without even binary version of pyarrow then the need for python docs is not very high.

[jorisvandenbossche]

I can try a bit further to see where I get, if you think this would be beneficial? But I do think if one is building the docs without even binary version of pyarrow then the need for python docs is not very high.

Yes, it certainly is less important (given that you need some python environment anyway, given that we are using sphinx to build the docs). So let's not worry about that use case here.

[AlenkaF]

This PR should be ready now @jorisvandenbossche

[conbench-apache-arrow]

Conbench analyzed the 6 benchmark runs on commit 65d603ae.

There were no benchmark performance regressions. 🎉

The full Conbench report has more details.