using gh release to publish themes / beneficial for custom themes ?

[parmentelat]

trafficstars

as of today, to the best of my knowledge, one can use an alternate/custom theme by specifying in myst.md e.g.

site:
  template: https://github.com/myst-templates/book-theme/archive/de4c1e9c09c6cd12fc529c1f22e8abf8e7f35381.zip

in this example, the zip file is produced by essentially 2 pieces

• a gh action
  https://github.com/jupyter-book/myst-theme/blob/main/.github/workflows/release.yml
• which in turn uses the topelvel Makefile
  https://github.com/jupyter-book/myst-theme/blob/main/Makefile

the effect of which being to create a commit in each of the 2 'ghost' repos

• executablebooks/myst-article-theme
• executablebooks/myst-book-theme

the content of that commit being then retrievable through github's /archive/ route

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the purpose of this issue is to propose the use of the GH releases instead, which would imho

• make this workflow simpler for the official themes : in particular
  • no need for the ghost repos
  • and a clearer web interface to browse through available releases/versions
  • also get rid of Makefile and group all the code in the gh actions
• but also make it simpler for forked instances of the official theme - typically for people who simply to do small changes - to publish themselves, as they could just use the exact same action without having to change or provision anything

---

I have made some preliminary work along these lines that are rather encouraging here https://github.com/flotpython/myst-theme/blob/gh-releases-mystmd-2317/.github/workflows/gh-release.yml and the resulting artefacts are browsable here https://github.com/flotpython/myst-theme/releases (only the book flavour is available in this POC)

so I'd love to hear from the core team to see if that could be of interest, and to hear about any pitfall that I have not identified at this point I reckon my understanding of the theme fetch/download code is minimal; plus I have only considered book/article and have no idea about the other available themes