Sphinx update

[ahwagner]

Yep. Looks like Sphinx 4.x would be insulated against the change BTW: sphinx-doc/sphinx@e5c905c.

Originally posted by @jmarshall in #387 (comment)

[ahwagner]

Drawing this conversation from the bugfix introduced in #387.

To recap the issue, the jinja2 package was recently updated to 3.1.0. The dev team takes a hardline approach to versioning: their version means what they want it to mean, and it definitely doesn't follow semantic versioning practices. In a way it's cool that the team is taking that stance as it reinforces best practices like dependency version pinning, but it does break from what is (in my view) widely held conventions about major/minor/patch components to a version. I know in VRS we have gone to great pains to keep every minor version increment backwards compatible, and our upcoming maturity model (branch) is designed to provide yet further guidance and communication about VRS data classes.

It seems like we're getting to the point where it is worthwhile to upgrade to Sphinx 4.x. The Sphinx devs are no longer maintaining 3.x and we are likely to see additional disruptions down the line from similar versioning non-conformists in the Sphinx dependency tree. We should revisit what it will take to update our site to the 4.x series.

[github-actions]

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