Catalog templates (POT) have not been generated since April – Transifex shows outdated source text #15771

What happens

The workflow Generate catalog templates (POT) files fetched automatically by transifex (.github/workflows/generate_catalog_templates.yml) has failed on every push to master since 2026-04-17. The last successful run was on 2026-04-16. Latest failure: https://github.com/nextcloud/documentation/actions/runs/35995213334

Cause

#14178 (merged 2026-04-17) bumped sphinxcontrib-phpdomain to 0.15.2, which requires Python >= 3.13.5. The job runs make gettext through ammaraskar/sphinx-action, which builds its own container from sphinxdoc/sphinx:8.2.3 with an older Python 3.13. Inside that container pip only finds versions up to 0.13.2:

ERROR: No matching distribution found for sphinxcontrib-phpdomain==0.15.2
...
ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'sphinx_rtd_theme'
make: *** [Makefile:185: gettext] Error 2

The actions/setup-python step in the same job does not help, because the action runs in its own container. #14507 fixed the same problem for the PDF Docker image only.

Impact

user_manual/locale/source/*.pot are still from early April (POT-Creation-Date: 2026-04-02 in webinterface.pot), so Transifex only has the April text, and pages added or rewritten since then cannot be translated.

Measured for Danish on 2026-10-13: every reviewed Danish string in Transifex does show up on https://docs.nextcloud.com/server/latest/user_manual/da/, so the translation side of the pipeline works. Still, 54 of the 87 Danish pages contain English text, about 680 sentences:

• about 350 on 15 pages that have no resource in Transifex at all: ai_assistant, collectives/getting_started, collectives/markdown_files, collectives/onboard_your_team, desktop/advanced_configuration, desktop/client_features, desktop/commandline, desktop/macosfileprovider, files/external_storage, files/tagging, files/transfer_ownership, groupware/user_migration, talk/call_from_anywhere, talk/conversation_organization, talk/conversation_presets
• about 250 in paragraphs that were added or rewritten after April on pages that are in Transifex
• about 75 in paragraphs that are translated in Transifex, but whose English text has changed since, so the translation no longer matches (for example in groupware/calendar, userpreferences and session_management)

Every other language is affected in the same way. Translators cannot fix any of this until the templates are generated again.

Possible fix

Run make gettext directly on the runner, the same way build-docs.yml already installs the requirements (actions/setup-python + python -m pip install -r requirements.txt), instead of using ammaraskar/sphinx-action. Alternatively, pin sphinxcontrib-phpdomain to 0.13.2 for this job only.

AI

Used Claude Opus 5.5 to assist in investigating this issue.