Canonical’s Sphinx Starter Pack 1.5¶
26 February 2026
These release notes cover new features and changes in Canonical’s Sphinx Starter Pack 1.5. The full commit log is available on GitHub.
Bring these changes into your docs:
What’s new in 1.5¶
New versioning¶
We’ve revised our approach to versions. Because the starter pack is an evergreen repository and not packaged software, it requires a different version process and scheme.
Starting with 1.5, the starter pack only provides major and minor version numbers. Patch
numbers now correspond to the Git commits in the repository’s main branch between
tagged releases.
Going forward, we’ll continue to tag major and minor releases, and distribute hotfixes to the tip of the repository’s history. If untagged patch versions are too risky, or your software policy requires that you lock to a specific version, we recommend you pin to the latest minor version.
New upgrade guide¶
For docs based on starter pack 1.3 or higher, we published Update the new starter pack.
Contribution guide¶
We’ve added a contribution guide for the project in CONTRIBUTING.md. It’s available
in upgraded repositories and on GitHub.
This guide is for developers of the starter pack. It’s not meant for your project. After updating, remove it from your project.
Quiet link check¶
The link check by default was too verbose, logging every checked link.
The check now only logs on errors.
Environment variable updates¶
For docs embedded into larger projects, the Make commands might be called in the
project’s main build system. Because docs builds used common names like BUILDDIR, it
was possible that they could conflict with variables set by the parent build system
meant for other software.
We made all the docs variables conditional, so you can set them ahead of time in the parent build system.
To mediate the risk of conflicts, we overhauled the variable names, adding a prefix and splitting along common word boundaries.
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Dependency changes in 1.5¶
Package |
From |
To |
|---|---|---|
canonical-sphinx |
>=0.5.1 |
~=0.6 |
sphinx-related-links |
>=0.1.1 |
>=0.1.2 |
Removed in 1.5¶
wokeignore directive¶
The wokeignore directive is removed because it was redundant. Use the
vale-ignore role
instead.
Contribution guide template¶
We removed a contribution guide template that was placed in the documentation in error.
Fixed in 1.5¶
Contributors¶
We would like to express a big thank you to all the people who contributed to this release:
a-velasco,
akcano,
jahn-junior,
medubelko,
minaelee,
nhennigan, and
odadacharles