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I'm running Arch. I just checked out python's hg and tried to build the docs, and found that I couldn't:
$ cd cpython/doc
$ make update
[lots of output stripped]
$ make pydoc-topics
mkdir -p build/pydoc-topics build/doctrees
python tools/sphinx-build.py -b pydoc-topics -d build/doctrees -D latex_paper_size= . build/pydoc-topics 
Traceback (most recent call last):
 File "tools/sphinx-build.py", line 27, in <module>
 from sphinx import main
 File "/home/kousu/pro/cpython/Doc/tools/sphinx/__init__.py", line 44
 except ImportError, err:
 ^
SyntaxError: invalid syntax
make: *** [build] Error 1
I edited the Makefile to say PYTHON = python2
and then it worked. Is the assumption that python2 is still supposed to be the default python everywhere? Is python 3 not able to build itself yet?
[kousu@galleon Doc]$ pacman -Qi python
Name : python
Version : 3.3.2-2
Description : Next generation of the python high-level scripting language
Architecture : x86_64
URL : http://www.python.org/
Licenses : custom
Groups : None
Provides : python3
Depends On : expat bzip2 gdbm openssl libffi zlib
Optional Deps : tk: for tkinter [installed]
 sqlite [installed]
Required By : cython ipython ktoblzcheck libreoffice-common python-cairo python-dateutil python-dbus python-markupsafe
 python-numpy python-pyparsing python-pytz python-pyzmq python-setuptools python-sip python-six python-sympy
 python-tornado python-xdg ranger youtube-dl
Optional For : systemd
Conflicts With : None
Replaces : python3
Installed Size : 86980.00 KiB
Packager : Bart
Build Date : Fri Sep 6 03:31:57 2013
Install Date : Tue Sep 17 10:29:36 2013
Install Reason : Installed as a dependency for another package
Install Script : No
Validated By : Signature

This is a duplicate of #10224.

I see that in Doc/tools/sphinx-build.py there is this check:
 if sys.version_info[:3] < (2, 4, 0):
 sys.stderr.write("""\
Error: Sphinx needs to be executed with Python 2.4 or newer (not 3.0 though).
(If you run this from the Makefile, you can set the PYTHON variable
to the path of an alternative interpreter executable, e.g.,
``make html PYTHON=python2.5``).
""")
But I never saw this and had to debug it myself. I submit the attached patch as a solution.

Looks ok for now.

New changeset 6e65ee2a0073 by Georg Brandl in branch '3.3':
Closes #19248: actually check for Python 3.x in tools/sphinx-build.py.
http://hg.python.org/cpython/rev/6e65ee2a0073 

> Is the assumption that python2 is still supposed to be the default python everywhere?
> Is python 3 not able to build itself yet?
You can manually install Sphinx >=1.1 (preferably >=1.2.*) (and its dependencies) using Python 3, and directly call `sphinx-build` from so installed Sphinx, instead of using `make`.