[IPython-dev] gh-pages problem...

[Fernando Perez]

Hey folks,

I'm really sorry that (due to 'real life' getting in the way) I missed
several important discussions, in particular this one:

https://github.com/ipython/ipython/issues/closed/#issue/239

As I just mentioned to Brian during a chat we had, there's a problem
with the default approach Github took to pages hosting: they put the
pages in a separate DAG inside the repo (the gh-pages branch), but
this means polluting the repo forever with all builds of the docs.
Furthermore, if we want to host multiple versions of the docs (as we
do today for each release and should continue doing), the storage
requirements are going to balloon.

Fortunately, there's a different approach that's easy to implement,
adds only minimal work, and is completely clean.  And I'd already
written the tools for it :)  For datarray, here's the gh-pages-hosted
docs:

http://fperez.github.com/datarray-doc/

The basic idea is just to have a *separate* git repo that *only* hosts
the gh-pages docs, in this case this one:

https://github.com/fperez/datarray-doc

A couple of scripts in the docs build file auto-generate all the
necessary commits and info, and the only manual step needed is to do a
single push.

So I think what we should do is:

- remove the gh-pages branch right away from the repo, so it doesn't
grow any larger.

- see if we can do a full purge of that data from the repo (I think
the added size is ~6MB right now) with git's filter-branch tool
(http://help.github.com/removing-sensitive-data has some tips).

- add the tools from my datarray repo to handle the process smoothly.


Min, if you think you're up for some/all of this let me know, I'm
still in Colombia but we can skype for me to give you some pointers.
If not, we can get together back home next week when I return and
clean this up.

Sorry I didn't catch this earlier when the pull request went up...

Cheers,

f

ps - obviously, please don't add anything at all to the gh-pages
branch anymore, so we have as little to clean up as possible.