Building documentation on aarch64 Linux does not work

[eddybl]

Building the documentation on an aarch64 Linux system does currently not work.

The reason is the sphinx-maven-plugin which depends on sphinx-binary. Both projects have the same maintainer and both projects did not see any commits over the last 2 years.

The issue is tracked here: trustin/sphinx-binary#10 (which also includes a work-around)

If one excludes building the documentation, Phoebus builds and runs without issues (this is an issue as part of building training VM, tracked here: epics-training/training-vm#13

Maybe a better longterm stable solution would be to build the documentation without relying on the sphinx-maven-plugin

[shroffk]

I agree that it might be nice to replace the sphinx-maven-plugin with something that is actively being maintained.... although I could not find any alternatives.

The benefit of the plugin is that it does not require you to install sphinx yourself. Ideally, I would be nice if the generate documentation step does not require users to go and install additional packages

For the time being maybe we can configure the profile to not execute on aarch64.

[eddybl]

I just think that this will create issues sooner or later anyway.

If I am not mistaken, then the advantage of using the sphinx binaries is that Python itself does not need to be installed during building. On the other hand Sphinx itself is actually not platform dependent, as long as we assume that having Python installed during the build process is acceptable.

Yes, without a solution for now we can exclude docs building for aarch64 for the training vm