Description

It looks like the specutils docs builds have been failing since Astropy's 7.1 release, due to two errors. First, I was getting

/home/docs/checkouts/readthedocs.org/user_builds/specutils/conda/stable/lib/python3.11/site-packages/astropy/units/quantity.py:docstring of astropy.units.quantity.Quantity.decompose:1: WARNING: py:class reference target not found: UnitBase [ref.class]

(see this build), and after adding UnitBase to our nitpick-exceptions file, ran into a second error:

/home/docs/checkouts/readthedocs.org/user_builds/specutils/conda/1220/lib/python3.11/site-packages/astropy/config/configuration.py:docstring of astropy.config.configuration.ConfigNamespace.items:1: WARNING: py:class reference target not found: ConfigItem [ref.class]

(see this build). After adding another nitpick-exceptions entry for ConfigItem, our builds are now passing. It's not clear to me why other downstream packages (e.g., jdaviz) haven't been affected by this, possible that there's something getting used in specutils that isn't there I guess. I did confirm that the specutils docs still build successfully with astropy<7.1.

Expected behavior

Astropy classes will not cause downstream readthedocs builds to fail.

How to Reproduce

No response

Versions

From my local build:

platform

platform.platform() = 'macOS-10.16-x86_64-i386-64bit'
platform.version() = 'Darwin Kernel Version 24.5.0: Tue Apr 22 19:54:49 PDT 2025; root:xnu-11417.121.6~2/RELEASE_ARM64_T6000'
platform.python_version() = '3.12.4'

packages

astropy 7.1.0
numpy 2.2.4
scipy 1.15.2
matplotlib 3.10.1
pandas 2.2.3
pyerfa 2.0.1.5