I agree with and second the comments regarding burden on volunteers. To elaborate, the LaTeX/PDF version of the documentation is very much a special case. No other format requires substantial work to curate and maintain OS-level dependencies, or has similar problems with e.g. non-Latin characters. We only have a few people working on ‘documentation infrastructure’ in the Python project; anecdotally it feels like I have had to spend about as much time working on LaTeX issues as everything else put together.
For clarity, download statistics were not used as the final arbiter of this decision. I looked at the counts relative to views for other pages, rather than absolute numbers, but to be clear, both are low. I echo the points made that scraping will likely account for some non-zero amount of these counts.
On the question of framing, and ability to render the documentation to PDFs in the future, I feel it is important to note we are not wholesale removing the support we currently have. We will continue to accept patches and PRs to fix broken builds. What changes is that the Python project will no longer provide PDFs as pre-built artefacts. The Developer’s Guide can continue to list the instructions needed to create PDFs locally, and perhaps those instructions could even be improved.
This decision can always be reversed, and in time I’d be happy to consider doing so, but on the current balance of demonstrated usage versus resource consumption (both volunteers and computers), removing PDFs is the right choice.[1]
A
I would seriously consider switching a non-LaTeX Sphinx backend for PDFs, but it would need substantial testing with the Python documentation. ↩︎