Increase the build frequency of English HTML stable (and pre-release?) documentation

[AA-Turner]

It's come up a few times that increasing the frequency of builds for /3/ would be useful for core developers and contributors (potentially also /dev/ and the pre-release versions, but I'm happy to start small).

I'm led to believe that the expensive bit of the builds is the large matrix of versions and languages and the and the ePUB, PDF, etc, formats, so I wondered if it would be possible to configure a distinct task to regenerate only the English HTML documentation every e.g. 4 or 6 hours?

I believe that the config for this is located at https://github.com/python/psf-salt/blob/main/salt/docs/init.sls, though I'm not sure.

cc: @JulienPalard @hugovk @ezio-melotti for thoughts and comments

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P.S.: I've tried a few times in the past to find out where the documentation build logs are, or at least to find out when the last rebuild was, without much success. The PSF-Salt docs have some information, and the docs themselves have a last built date (sans time) -- if anyone could point me in the right direction, I'd be very grateful!

[hugovk]

I'm supportive.

Once a day feels too infrequent for the English HTML docs, I'd like to see them built more frequently, maybe even triggering a deploy from merge.

But if on cron, perhaps we could do hourly, or every 15 minutes.

The download artifacts and translations could remain on a daily schedule.

P.S.: I've tried a few times in the past to find out where the documentation build logs are, or at least to find out when the last rebuild was, without much success. The PSF-Salt docs have some information, and the docs themselves have a last built date (sans time) -- if anyone could point me in the right direction, I'd be very grateful!

I think it requires ssh access to the server?

It would be good to know the build times for various builds, and see the logs.

the docs themselves have a last built date (sans time)

Adding the time would be a helpful addition.

[AA-Turner]

Adding the time would be a helpful addition.

This at least is a quick fix: python/cpython#110091

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[JulienPalard]

It was the case previously: python/psf-salt@38ee687

But building without PDF artifacts leads, at least on version bumps, to a few hours with HTML but without PDF.

This lead to spam on docs@ with people complaining about the absence of PDF (looks like they're used!).

See also: python/psf-salt@38ee687

See also: 1a0ad2e

[AA-Turner]

a few hours with HTML but without PDF.

Is it possible to not delete the PDFs (ie save them and only refresh every 24h?)

[JulienPalard]

The problem is not about deleting PDFs, it's about them not being created at all during releases bumps.

It happen on every release (yearly major, but also each minor releases).

The PDF files has names like: https://docs.python.org/3.11/archives/python-3.11.5-docs-pdf-letter.zip

so when bumping from 3.11.5 to 3.11.6 if we only build HTML we're generating an HTML link to a non-existent PDF file.

I tried to mitigate this by displaying a nice 404 page, see:

https://docs.python.org/3.11/archives/python-3.11.999-docs-pdf-letter.zip

but it still lead to frustrated users and complains.

[encukou]

Would it be possible to make the 404 page link to the corresponding directory listing, like https://docs.python.org/3.11/archives/ ?

[AA-Turner]

xref python/docs-community#131

[AA-Turner]

Per python/docs-community#131 (comment), this has now been done.

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