I'm not sure. See also https://github.com/astropy/astropy-helpers/blob/master/astropy_helpers/sphinx/local/python3links.txt

@mhvk - is your python3 3.5 or 3.4? (I should have read the original astropy issue).
Maybe the links changes between the two releases (though if they were fixed in the main python inventory they should work now).

Replacing the local file with None means that sphinx will try to download the objects.inv from the link, and it will definitely mess up things for the python2 docs build (also it would make sense this case to delete https://github.com/astropy/astropy-helpers/blob/master/astropy_helpers/sphinx/conf.py#L45). Even if we say that astropy only supports sphinx with python3, it still screws up things for affiliated packages.

Since conf.py is just a python file, can we make the content of intersphinx_mapping['python'] depend on version?
`

That sounds like a plan that also saves me the pain of figuring out how I digged those links in the local file out of the binary inventory.
Will you try that or shall I?

@bsipocz - I turned this into a PR, but am not sure this is the right way to go about it; if not, please feel free to make an alternative PR.

@mhvk - Can you confirm that this works with python2? I fear that removing the local hack inventory will brake those links that are listed in it at the moment.

@bsipocz - sadly, it doesn't seem this simple solution suffices. Building astropy documentation on python2, I seem to get only warnings for a missing reference to bytes, while on python3, I get warnings about missing references to unicode, plus missing references to file, cPickle and various exceptions.*. I think some of these are actual python2 assumptions in the documentation; the bytes/unicode thing is hopefully easier to fix.

I don't think preserving inter-sphinx references to all Python builtins is deeply important in all cases. I like this solution, and for any cases where it doesn't work add nitpick exceptions.

See #216 for a solution that works for both py2 ad py3. Since most affiliates uses python2 I think that we should keep the py2 compatibility of the helpers for a little longer (even if switching to py3 sphinx builds in astropy master).

This can be closed as the superseding #216 is merged.

Yes, you're right. Closing...