[petsc-dev] plan to transition to new documentation and webpages?

[Jed Brown]

The one value-add that comes from ReadTheDocs is its version switcher, which we'd need to do ourselves.

I've been using this strategy (for stand-alone preview) on a different project and it's working great. We can decide how to merge it (i.e., where the doc job should run).

https://gitlab.com/petsc/petsc/-/merge_requests/3523

I think we should run https://petsc.org from docs generated on main using Sphinx. We can link to the old site for older versions. I'd be in favor of making https://mcs.anl.gov/petsc (but not its subdirectories) redirect to petsc.org.

Barry Smith <bsmith at petsc.dev> writes:

>    Is the plan still to use ReadTheDocs (which does support multiple versions of all the docs) or to "build them ourselves"? All ReadTheDocs does is run a Sphinx document builder script the user provides and we can do that ourselves and don't need ReadTheDocs to do it for us. In fact, if we do it ourselves we have much more flexibility since you ware not restricted to running only a Sphinx document builder script.
>
>    Patrick, Jacob and others have done a fantastic job moving a lot of material into much better pages, it seems nuts not to be using it all.
>
>   Barry
>
>
>> On Mar 6, 2021, at 12:33 PM, Satish Balay <balay at mcs.anl.gov> wrote:
>> 
>> This is partly due to the complexity of having some docs from 'release' and some from 'main' branches.
>> 
>> We had a way to manage this when all docs were on petsc website - but its not clear how to do this properly with readthedocs
>> 
>> Satish
>> 
>> On Fri, 5 Mar 2021, Barry Smith wrote:
>> 
>>> 
>>>  What is the plan to transition to the new documentation and webpages?
>>> 
>>>  I go to https://www.mcs.anl.gov/petsc/index.html <https://www.mcs.anl.gov/petsc/index.html> and mostly see the old stuff etc. Our next release is coming up soon and it would be nice to have transitioned out of the old material and to the new material by/at the new release.
>>> 
>>>  What do we need to do to make this happen?
>>> 
>>>   Thanks
>>> 
>>>   Barry
>>> 
>>> 
>>