DOC: update sphinx requirements for doc building

[jorisvandenbossche]

Simplified the version requirement for sphinx (>= 1.3.2). In principle >= 1.2.2 but < 1.3.0 also works, but left it out for simplicity.

@cswarth Do you have other things that you find unclear about the requirements for the doc build environment?

[cswarth]

I don't think clarity is the problem as much as being a relatively high barrier to entry for contributing to the docs. By the time you get done installing all the prerequisites and optional dependencies, it feels quite onerous. I used pip to install the optional dependencies as I ran across them, but often wished there were a requirements.txt (or more likely, Dockerfile) to establish a known working environment.

[TomAugspurger]

We could change the suggestions of conda create -n pandas_dev python=3 --file ci/requirements_dev.txt to ci/requirements_all.txt

[jreback]

docker is way too heavyweight for anything like this

[jorisvandenbossche]

We could change the suggestions of conda create -n pandas_dev python=3 --file ci/requirements_dev.txt to ci/requirements_all.txt

That is already mentioned in the section about creating a development environment (http://pandas-docs.github.io/pandas-docs-travis/contributing.html#creating-a-development-environment), but it would maybe made more prominent in the section on doc building requirements (instead of just linking to that section)

[cswarth]

I only mentioned a dockerfile because I found there were extra-pythonic dependencies that were not captured by pip or conda. For instance, I couldn't install matplotlib unless I first ran apt-get install pkg-config and apt-get install libfreetype6-dev.

[jreback]

not true conda installs everything u need. if you are using pip then YOU do need to manage dependencies yourself. and that's why we don't use pip for anything.

[codecov-io]

Current coverage is 84.33%

Merging #13532 into master will decrease coverage by <.01%

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[jorisvandenbossche]

I only mentioned a dockerfile because I found there were extra-pythonic dependencies that were not captured by pip or conda.

@cswarth If you had problems installing matplotlib with conda, you can report it over there, but normally this should just work.

I personally think the instructions of how to set up a development environment are already quite elaborate, but improvements are always welcome!

I reworded the reference to first creating a dev environment for building the docs to make this more clear.