Dev website

[vincentarelbundock]

Sometimes, it is nice to publish two separate websites:

1. CRAN release
2. Dev version

pkgdown allows this by creating a whole copy of the website in docs/dev when version numbers are not "round".

If we offer this possibility, I'd prefer to have an explicit argument in render_docs(), instead of automagically doing guess work that may not always work if people don't use semantic versioning.

[etiennebacher]

That would be cool indeed. I don't know how it works for pkgdown though.

Even better would be to have a version selector on the website. I know mkdocs has mike but I'm still exploring how this works for polars. docsify also has a plugin for this but it seems early work or abandoned.

We might want a more general approach

[grantmcdermott]

+1ing as a happy altdoc user.

I'd love to be able to do this for the tinyplot website, for example.

[etiennebacher]

I feel this isn't going to be easy to implement because not all tools support it and among those who do, it's going to be quite different:

• for mkdocs there's mike that I mentioned above
• for quarto I suppose one could create several subfolders in docs with version numbers (e.g 1.1, 1.2, dev) and then add a dropdown containing links to each of those subfolders. So in the end the URL would be like https://grantmcdermott.com/tinyplot/1.2/man/.... This is just an idea and I didn't try in practice.

Overall, gathering several very different tools in one package sounded like a good idea to me when I started the package but now it's more a technical burden. In the end I feel like people are mostly interested in quarto websites while I prefer mkdocs (in terms of look, number of plugins, etc.). That said I still have packages using docsify or docute (altdoc itself uses it) so it's probably not going anywhere, but I wouldn't be against extracting all the quarto code in a separate package (quartodown?).

[vincentarelbundock]

FWIW, I feel that spinning it off might be a lot of work, and I'm not sure it's worth it.

I personally have time to fix bugs in altdoc, but I don't have time to implement new features unless I plan to use them myself.

I know I'm the one who opened this issue, but for transparency, I'll say that I don't expect to work on this anytime soon.

Honestly, I think it's fine if the package gets bug fixes and is otherwise pretty stagnant. It's pretty great as-is, and we don't need to please everybody (especially given our time constraints).

(This isnt a commentary on Grant's +1. It's always great to hear interest.)

[grantmcdermott]

All fair and obviously understood. I’m similarly constrained, but if I find time (and a solution) for a PR then…