Version switcher not working for old docs

[datapythonista]

In your own website, if you're in an old version of the docs, the links in the version switcher are incorrect. Change version from example from here: https://pydata-sphinx-theme.readthedocs.io/en/v0.8.0/index.html

We had a similar problem with pandas, for context see this comment: https://github.com/pandas-dev/pandas/pull/48600#issuecomment-1252065060

[choldgraf]

It looks like in our documentation this problem begins with 0.8 and is fine >= 0.8.1:

• https://pydata-sphinx-theme.readthedocs.io/en/v0.8.1/
• https://pydata-sphinx-theme.readthedocs.io/en/v0.8.0/

It seems like on 0.8.0 it's adding an extra v to the URL (so the URL incorrectly renders as https://pydata-sphinx-theme.readthedocs.io/en/vv0.8.1/

For your theme, could you backport an update to your documentation so that the pydata theme is updated and thus the switcher configuration behaves properly?

I don't think there is anything that we can do about this for the pydata theme, because we can't backport a higher version of our own theme to the documentation of the same theme. IMO our solution should be to remove documentation for versions older than ~0.8.1

@drammock could you provide a rationale for why you think this issue should block any future releases?

[datapythonista]

For us it broke in the release we started using url instead of version, so we kept the versions broken in the json, and the links are working well now. I think version is also used to compare the current version, and that may be broken, but not quite sure if there is anything not fully working.

[choldgraf]

My feeling is that we don't want to block all future releases on this issue, and we should remove the block-release label from this issue. I am not sure what exactly the problem is here, or what the fix should be, but it doesn't seem like it is a bug that has been introduced since the last release, and so I'm not sure what benefit we get from blocking a new release.

[drammock]

My feeling is that we don't want to block all future releases on this issue

agreed. I've removed the tag. I initially added it somewhat hastily without looking closely enough at what the problem was. I'd like to leave this open though as a reminder to consider backporting a fix... IMO there is a valid use case for switching back and forth between current and older doc versions (namely, figuring out when a change was introduced if it's not in the changelog), which requires that the switcher work correctly on the older sites.

[choldgraf]

Definitely agree we should track this one - though I'm still not sure yet what the underlying fix needs to be.