Package: release-notes
Severity: important
Dear Maintainer,
The release-notes package currently fails to build on Debian trixie, using
Sphinx v8.1.3 - and this appears to be due to the 'extlinks' configuration in
the conf.py file.
It seems that Sphinx v6.0.0 became stricter[1] about pattern-replacements in
extlink captions; this causes an error of the following format to appear during
build:
$ make html LANGS=en
...
Exception occurred:
File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/sphinx/ext/extlinks.py", line 109, in
role
title = caption % part
~~~~~~~~^~~~~~
TypeError: not all arguments converted during string formatting
As described in a relevant bugtracker thread[2] upstream, there are two options
to fix this: either configure affected extlinks to contain the same number of
replacement patterns as the URL, or alternatively set them to empty (None). If
set to empty, the complete URL is used as the user-facing hyperlink title.
For the release-notes package, where extlinks are typically references to
manpages, I think it would be preferable to display only the manual short name
as the link title, instead of a complete URL, so I'll offer a merge request on
Salsa to update the captions to contain a single replacement pattern ('%s').
I have confirmed that doing so fixes the build and produces sensible HTML
output using Debian trixie, and also that the change is backwards compatible
to Debian bookworm and does not affect the HTML build output in that release.
Regards,
James
[1] - https://github.com/sphinx-doc/sphinx/pull/10471
[2] - https://github.com/sphinx-doc/sphinx/issues/11094
