Sphinx: “no module named compat”

Question

Our Travis CI tests just started breaking randomly:

https://travis-ci.org/Gallopsled/pwntools/builds/343962397

With the error message:

Could not import extension sphinxcontrib.autoprogram (exception: No module named compat)

It appears that the issue is that one of our Sphinx dependencies relies on deprecated functionality: https://github.com/sphinx-contrib/autoprogram/issues/1

How can I work around this?

Answer 1

We can dynamically re-inject the module and its contents with the code below, by putting it in the Sphinx conf.py :

try:
    import sphinx.util.compat
except ImportError:
    import sys
    import types
    import sphinx.util
    import docutils.parsers.rst
    class compat(types.ModuleType):
        Directive = docutils.parsers.rst.Directive
    sphinx.util.compat = compat('sphinx.util.compat')
    sys.modules['sphinx.util.compat'] = sphinx.util.compat