License text is 404 on oolite.readthedocs.io

[another_commander]

Basically what the title says. The license.md document is not found on readthedocs. I think that can be a problem if we are pulling documentation to include in the 1.93 builds from there.

[Cholmondely]

What wrong with just having normal .pdfs in the download? The ones we have been using up until now? Has this method stopped working?

I'm just reminiscing about all the fun and games we had with Oolite.org being sold, with the original bulletin boards crashing and the bot invasions of this new bulletin board. And all the images on this BB which I can't see because I'm in the UK or because they have been taken down by Tinypic & Photobucket. Relying on other websites might be fine at this precise moment in time but how long until problems crop up?

And. I downloaded v.1.77.1 so that I could try out some of the older OXPs which broke with v.1.80 & v.1.82. It downloaded with all the relevant documentation. What happens in 10 years time after Phkb converts to both Manicheanism and Elite Dangerous, his zillions of OXPs languish unupdated, and someone wants to download v.1.92 to play them but all the "readthedocs.io" gubbins is for v.1.9996x?

[another_commander]

I have to agree that we really should not be relying on external websites for anything related to our code and documentation.

[phkb]

after Phkb converts to both Manicheanism and Elite Dangerous

In case anyone is concerned, I've already tried E:D, and haven't touched it in a number of years now.
And I don't think a conversion to Manicheanism would preclude me working on my mods.

[Cholmondely]

And I don't think a conversion to Manicheanism would preclude me working on my mods.

St Augustine of Hippo never worked on any Oolite OXPs back in his Manichean period.

Neither did Psattiq, Faustus of Mileve or khagan Bögü Qaghan.

Manicheanism is murder to Oolite modding!

[mcarans]

Basically what the title says. The license.md document is not found on readthedocs. I think that can be a problem if we are pulling documentation to include in the 1.93 builds from there.

This might be to do with moving the license.md file to suit FlatHub's requirements - I'll check what happened there. The html and pdfs are generated from the markdown that is in GitHub by readthedocs and then published to the readthedocs site.

I have to agree that we really should not be relying on external websites for anything related to our code and documentation.

I don't understand what you mean here. We are reliant on external websites eg. the source for the code and the documentation is all in GitHub - the licence is here: https://github.com/OoliteProject/oolite ... LICENSE.md. The problem is likely a build issue in copying that md to the right place during the readthedocs build. I'll investigate.

What wrong with just having normal .pdfs in the download? The ones we have been using up until now? Has this method stopped working?

I'm just reminiscing about all the fun and games we had with Oolite.org being sold, with the original bulletin boards crashing and the bot invasions of this new bulletin board. And all the images on this BB which I can't see because I'm in the UK or because they have been taken down by Tinypic & Photobucket. Relying on other websites might be fine at this precise moment in time but how long until problems crop up?

And. I downloaded v.1.77.1 so that I could try out some of the older OXPs which broke with v.1.80 & v.1.82. It downloaded with all the relevant documentation. What happens in 10 years time after Phkb converts to both Manicheanism and Elite Dangerous, his zillions of OXPs languish unupdated, and someone wants to download v.1.92 to play them but all the "readthedocs.io" gubbins is for v.1.9996x?

I didn't know that anyone actually installed and played really old versions of the game, but then I don't have time to play even the latest version myself! I can look into adding a step to include the generated pdfs as part of the release.

[phkb]

St Augustine of Hippo never worked on any Oolite OXPs back in his Manichean period.

His OXP output in his non-Manichean period is nothing to write home about either, though...

[mcarans]

Although the license file was correctly copied from the root for local documentation builds, I missed adding the copy command to the readthedocs builds.

I have created a PR: https://github.com/OoliteProject/oolite/pull/554

In the meantime, I temporarily moved readthedocs to point to my fork's master branch and the licence is where it should be: https://oolite.readthedocs.io/en/latest/license/

I've also found another way to generate the pdfs from markdown that avoids having to do it through an mkdocs plugin. Something like this but needs some experimenting with page breaks:

Code: Select all

pandoc advice.md -o advice.pdf --pdf-engine=typst -V mainfont="DejaVu Sans"

Using that, it will be easy to create some pdfs in the release. I'll make that change in a separate PR.

[hiran]

What wrong with just having normal .pdfs in the download? The ones we have been using up until now? Has this method stopped working?

Just like you I also favour the game and it's documentation being bundled together. The reason this is no longer the case - at least as much as I understand it - is accessibility.

The classic setup of the application came as a download file with an installer. This installer would create directories, place files here and there and give start options for users so they could run the game or browse the documentation without having to search much.
At the same time especially the Linux builds relied on libraries delivered by the operating systems. Over time these libraries changed (different OS provided different versions) but Oolite demanded the always same. This became problematic so another solution was found.

What is called 'modern build' produces AppImage and Flatpak files. These are single files that contain the application and all required libraries. Installation does not create directories and files. The one file is directly executable. If the documentation were inside this one file users would have to perform all kinds of stunts to access it. Hence there is no documentation folder and with that no documentation. This missing bit was resolved by pointing to readthedocs.io.

For the same reasons you mentioned I am not happy but do not know of a better way. Maybe there is, and it is yet to be explored.

[another_commander]

I don't understand what you mean here. We are reliant on external websites eg. the source for the code and the documentation is all in GitHub

You are correct that we have all our code and docs on github. All I'm saying is that, if github were to go offline tomorrow, we could still build the game on our local systems, create installers etc., i.e. we are not relying on github being there. But if the build process tries to download pdfs from any external site and then use those pdfs in the final package produced, then we have a problem if that site goes down. We will not be able to build packages. Your attempt to generate documentation by not relying on readthedocs is more than welcome.