Readthedocs.org: Cleanup on removed branches/tags

[agjohnson]

We currently aren't cleaning up removed branches/tags when there are removed from the source repository. We might be able to piggyback on these removals to clean up old versions, but I do see some value in keeping these versions around for historical purposes.

We need to decide:

• Do we need to be opinionated about this?
• What does the removal workflow look like if we do support automatic removal on branch/tag removal?
• Should we instead only remove unbuilt versions?

[projectgus]

Hi folks, I'm the user who originally reported this to @agjohnson . Our situation is we accidentally pushed a tag for a commit on our master branch. Even though it's been deleted from the repo it's persisting in readthedocs and inserting itself into the "git rev-parse" version string in the page title of the master branch's docs

(Our docs are https://espressif-esp-idf.readthedocs-hosted.com/en/latest/ for repo @ https://github.com/espressif/esp-idf/tags - note the audio-weekly tag does not exist but is in the page title!)

I see Anthony's point that knowing how to do automatic removal may be complex[*], but we really need some kind of manual removal option for the tag at minimum - otherwise we're stuck with this misleading tag until we arbitrarily re-tag our repo with something, release a new version, or (maybe?) delete and recreate our RTD project from scratch.

[*] To be honest it seems to me that if someone deletes a branch/tag from the repo, they probably want it deleted everywhere. But there are probably use cases I haven't thought of.

[ericholscher]

@agjohnson I believe the code should be deleting removed versions/tags. If not, there is a bug, but I've checked this a few times and it appears to work in at least some common cases.

[krzychb]

Adding to description by @projectgus - Another (more visible) place where deleted tag shows up is PDF version of docs - https://readthedocs.com/projects/espressif-esp-idf/downloads/pdf/latest/

(A)

(B)
The same commit e7db29b on community site https://media.readthedocs.org/pdf/esp-idf/latest/esp-idf.pdf looks as follows:

(C)
Below is corresponding latest commit on GitHub

[krzychb]

Hi guys, could you provide an update on resolution status?

[stsewd]

I checked all the links, everything is ok now, @krzychb are you still having this issue?

[krzychb]

@stsewd, the latest docs in pdf look fine:
https://readthedocs.com/projects/espressif-esp-idf/downloads/pdf/latest/

[ericholscher]

Great!