idea: create a sphinx extension to insert output of flux commands in examples directly into docs

[grondo]

This is just an idea -- I'm unsure if it could work in practice, but it would be neat if we could develop a sphinx extension that could substitute output of flux command examples in the docs directly during the docs build.

There already exists a sphinxcontrib-programoutput extension that can substitute program output into docs at build time, e.g.:

.. command-output:: python -V

Output:

$ python -V
Python 2.7.1

Perhaps starting from this implementation, someone clever could create an extension that was capable of interacting with a Flux instance and would substitute output of commands. Perhaps our deployed docker images could be used in the Readthedocs build (not sure if that is possible).

[vsoch]

This actually would work if we just had them generated in a running container, e.g., I do it with the flux-restful-api (although it's using python and interacting with flux via REST, see this tutorial: https://flux-framework.org/flux-restful-api/auto_examples/api_tutorial.html#sphx-glr-auto-examples-api-tutorial-py. That's possible with sphinx gallery which (typically) you run Python for - could you elaborate if you are just interested in running flux python examples or something else?