sphinx-panels is unmaintained

[wshanks]

What is the current behavior?

sphinx-panels is listed in requirements-dev.txt but it is no longer maintained (see warning here. Besides it not being good to use software that is not maintained, an issue with sphinx-panels is that it sets a maximum version for sphinx which is getting out of date. New versions of other sphinx extensions like sphinx-autodoc-typehints set a higher minimum sphinx version than the maximum version of sphinx-panels.

Suggested solutions

sphinx-panels lists sphinx-design as the continuation of sphinx-panels. The only usage of sphinx-panels that I see searching the codebase is for the dropdown directive. sphinx-design has a dropdown directive and does not mention dropdown in the migration guide for sphinx-panels, so maybe it will work as a drop in replacement?

[wshanks]

@nkanazawa1989 I assigned to you because I think you added the usage of the dropdown directive?

[mtreinish]

Fwiw, sphinx-design also sets a cap on the sphinx version iirc. I've been planning to stop using drop down directive in other places because of this (I started this for terra in Qiskit/qiskit#9087)

[wshanks]

Fwiw, sphinx-design also sets a cap on the sphinx version iirc

I hadn't looked into it further than seeing the warning on sphinx-panels about it not being maintained. The current version of sphinx-design limits sphinx to <6 and sphinx 6.1.3 is the latest version. However, sphinx 6.0 was only released 3 weeks ago and it looks like the hold up for sphinx-design is that their test dependencies have not all added support for sphinx 6 so they are waiting until their tests run against sphinx 6 according to executablebooks/sphinx-design#106 (comment).

For reference, I noticed this because I was trying to use pip-compile from pip-tools to trace the version of another dependency that was flagged by a security scanner and ended up getting this output:

There are incompatible versions in the resolved dependencies:                                                                                                                                
  Sphinx>=1.8.3 (from -r requirements-dev.txt (line 6))                                                                                                                                      
  sphinx (from qiskit-sphinx-theme==1.10.1->-r requirements-dev.txt (line 7))                                                                                                                
  sphinx>=1.8 (from nbsphinx==0.8.11->-r requirements-dev.txt (line 12))                                                                                                                     
  sphinx>=5.3 (from sphinx-autodoc-typehints==1.21.2->-r requirements-dev.txt (line 8))                                                                                                      
  sphinx<5,>=2 (from sphinx-panels==0.6.0->-r requirements-dev.txt (line 11))