Issue with current documentation:

With SciPy 2025 coming up, and the possibility of having new people join for sprints, i figured it would be worth pointing out a possible hiccup.

• When building the docs from a fresh codespaces environment (or new conda environment using environment.yml), the command spin docs finishes with error messages. This are the same numpy.distutils error message discussed in DOC: docs build warnings #28694.

The issue occurs because of the pinned 3.12 python version.

Idea or request for content:

The issue disappears by manually changing the python version back to 3.11. These steps should error free build the docs on codespaces.

1. Make a branch
2. Change 3.12 to 3.11 in environment.yml and push the changes to your branch.
3. Create a codespaces on GitHub for the new branch.
4. conda activate numpy-dev
5. spin test && pip install -r requirements/doc_requirements.txt && spin docs

My hope is this could help anyone new who wants to help but can't figure out why they keep getting errors. Maybe there is a simpler way to help someone new that doesn't involve changing environment.yml.