@crwilcox IIRC, you needed a specific version of sphinx. Will this break you?

We made this change here: googleapis/python-bigtable#20 and the docs build passed successfully, so we wanted to make this change more broadly.

@kolea2 is correct. A contributor made this change to bigtable specifically. And it seems @frankyn has had the same experience for storage specifically. This change undoes a mitigation while we were incompatible with newer versions of sphinx.

We did the same change in python-storage: googleapis/python-storage#103

Didn't realize it came from this parent template. The rationale for it:

https://github.com/readthedocs/recommonmark

# for Sphinx-1.4 or newer
extensions = ['recommonmark'] # <---- this 

# for Sphinx-1.3
from recommonmark.parser import CommonMarkParser

source_parsers = {
    '.md': CommonMarkParser,
}

source_suffix = ['.rst', '.md']