Hi Matthias,

Sorry to hear it's a pain for you. Can you explain in more details what hurt your workflow?

We bumped Sphinx, as Victor said, to fix rendering issues in those documentation translations: zh-tw, zh-cn, fr and ja, so it's not a feature or an ideology of "being up-to-date", we were fixing an issue in those 4 translations.

Please also note that in the near future we'll probably stick to a fresh version of Sphinx as we're expecting other fixes or features to land, I don't have all of them in mind but at least:

- https://github.com/sphinx-doc/sphinx/issues/5561 (release in 1.8.2)
- https://github.com/sphinx-doc/sphinx/pull/5559 (to be released in 2.0.0)

The colspan/rowspan thing is needed for the documentation of Python 3.8, so we'll have to bump to sphinx 2.0 for Python 3.8.