It’s worth mentioning the amount of time it takes to build the docs. Especially as we’re often usually building 3 versions times 16 translations.
- Three versions (3.13-3.15) of English HTML docs takes about 6 minutes
- The HTML for three versions and translations is between 3.75-6.75 hours
- The non-HTML for three versions and translations takes about 23.5 hours
Security releases of 3.9-3.12 also need a rebuild for all languages.
There’s not just the regular docs builds. We build docs as part of the release process. Just this week with 3.13.6 we ran into problems with the PDF dependencies taking a long time to download and timing out the build.
It also takes a considerable amount of maintenance for PDF and EPUB.
- PDF because of all the different LaTeX engines/libraries needed. Some translations need different ones. We sometimes get build failures due to specific characters in translations which can be hard to debug.
- EPUB because it’s XHTML, and when we use modern HTML5 that isn’t strict XHTML it can break EPUB. This can require fixes in both our config and in Sphinx plugins.