Expose "stable" docs endpoint

[bdice]

Is your feature request related to a problem?

I refer to MDAnalysis in the documentation for freud through an intersphinx mapping. I saw that the docs have moved to docs.mdanalysis.org. It would be nice to have a "stable" version of the MDAnalysis docs that could be referenced.

Describe the solution you'd like

Add a "stable" docs version pointing to the latest stable release. Something like https://docs.mdanalysis.org/stable/. This is also how some other Python projects label their docs, e.g.

• https://numpy.org/doc/stable/
• https://scikit-learn.org/stable/

Describe alternatives you've considered

I could pin my library to link to the 1.0.0 docs but that would become out of date as new MDAnalysis versions are released.

[orbeckst]

Thanks @bdice , we (I mean, @lilyminium ) is working hard on making all of this version switching magic work. Perhaps we can generate yet another set of redirects to "stable" when we publish a release?

We have a PageRule that rewrites https://docs.mdanalysis.org/<PATH> to https://docs.mdanalysis.org/1.0.0/<PATH> but that does not seem to work for https://docs.mdanalysis.org/objects.inv (only https://docs.mdanalysis.org/1.0.0/objects.inv works).

[bdice]

@orbeckst @lilyminium That would be great! I use ReadTheDocs for deployment/hosting and it handles both a "stable" (release) and "latest" (development branch) build. I'm not sure how that works on your end, but it sounds like you have the right idea in mind for a fix. Much appreciated. 👍

[lilyminium]

It looks like numpy just has the same docs available at https://numpy.org/doc/stable/ and https://numpy.org/doc/1.19 with no redirects, we could do the same thing with MDAnalysis and docs.mdanalysis.org/stable and docs.mdanalysis.org/1.0.0 ? Currently URLs like docs.mdanalysis.org/latest redirect to docs.mdanalysis.org/1.0.0 but that doesn't work for downloading an objects.inv. (Interestingly, www.mdanalysis.org/docs/ does redirect intersphinx to docs.mdanalysis.org/1.0.0, but we may want to retire that PageRule someday.)

[bdice]

Intersphinx threw a warning when it followed the redirect from www.mdanalysis.org/docs/ to docs.mdanalysis.org/1.0.0, which is the only way I knew this was a potential issue. Didn't want to count on an old link to stay alive. 😉

[lilyminium]

https://docs.mdanalysis.org/dev/ and https://docs.mdanalysis.org/stable/ should now exist as endpoints.

[bdice]

@lilyminium Thanks again! I confirm that stable worked for me. 👍