The man pages are only built and installed if sphinx is available.

Would it be possible to include the built pages in the repository? It would be useful for users with a situation like mine.

@sebastinas I tried installing sphinx with pipx, then installing bpython, but it still didn't build the man pages. I assume this is caused by pipx's manner of installing packages, so in this case I think it's more accurate to say that the man pages just aren't built if someone is using pipx.

So is pipx ignoring data_files?

No, it doesn't. But installing sphinx with pipx get sphinx installed in a different virtual env. So it's not available when building bpython.

Yes, I didn't quite have time to check the docs yesterday but I had started to suspect that. I don't have a definitive answer for whether pipx would generate the docs if sphinx were installed globally via regular pip or apt or something, but that isn't recommended anyway so it's somewhat irrelevant.

Overall, I think if you want to start tracking the generated man file as part of the repo itself that would be great, but otherwise we can close this issue as a "won't fix" since the actual problem has been identified.