Build against Sphinx pre-releases/development branches to help test theme compatibility/readiness

[pradyunsg]

Follows from #114 -- it would be good to build websites with latest Sphinx prerelease and latest development branch of Sphinx, to provide meaningful information to the developers of themes and Sphinx.

/cc @AA-Turner -- do you think this would be meaningfully useful to Sphinx's maintainers?
/cc @humitos who has shown how to do this with a build of this site on RTD, in #114.

[pradyunsg]

@humitos Is there any way to do scheduled rebuilds on RTD? Part of why this site is on GA + GitHub Pages (other than historic reasons) is that GA allows us to perform regular rebuilds of the site.

[humitos]

Is there any way to do scheduled rebuilds on RTD?

Hrm, I'd say it's not possible, no 😞 At least in an automated way with the default features.

That said, you could always do it using the APIv3 (https://docs.readthedocs.io/en/stable/api/v3.html#build-triggering) and a cronjob somewhere else -- but I suppose that's one of the things you want to avoid 😄

[AA-Turner]

do you think this would be meaningfully useful to Sphinx's maintainers?

Unsure. What would I as a Sphinx maintainer be looking for here?

A

[pradyunsg]

What would I as a Sphinx maintainer be looking for here?

If I knew that, I wouldn't ask. :P

More seriously, I'm guessing it'd be a reasonable gauge for "how does the newer version affect themes" and if the theme ecosystem is ready for the newer Sphinx version -- point of the pre-releases is to provide early testing, and this would probably serve as some of that. :)