Readthedocs.org: Provides a way to set the "stable" version manually

[humitos]

This issue comes from https://github.com/rtfd/readthedocs.org/issues/3268#issuecomment-345310676

I think it could be a good nice to have, so I'm opening this issue so we can discuss here if it would be better or it could be more confusing at the end.

Besides, how it should be implemented in the UI; I image it

• in the "Admin -> Versions" page a stable title with an input and a description "Leave it blank to use the RTD default logic to determine the stable version")
• as a setting somewhere in the yaml file

[aasis21]

@humitos @ericholscher, I would like to take up this issue. For UI part we can give a ChoiceField, so that there is also no validation issue. What do you say?
And in yaml file, we can give a stable_version:version_name

[sfdye]

+1 for this feature, my build is failing because stable is not able figure out the latest tagged release

[ericholscher]

Isn't the way to do this to just create your own branch named "stable" and use that?

[sfdye]

@ericholscher I thought rtd will automatically pick up the latest release tag as stable version?

[ericholscher]

It should, but this ticket is about specifying it manually. If there is a bug in our version resolution, that is a separate issue.

[sfdye]

@ericholscher that would be my #3714

[agjohnson]

Moving this out of the YAML milestone. If we did implement anything here, I don't think we'd want it linked to the YAML file.

[stsewd]

RTD allow overriding the stable version by creating a branch or tag named stable (it's a little buggy right now #3913), isn't that what we want?

[stsewd]

Not sure if this is something we can put on our yaml, per-version settings only. This looks like a project setting.

[ericholscher]

I feel like the answer here should be "If you want a custom stable version, create either a tag or branch in your project with that name." Do we want to apply the same logic to latest as well? If so, we should likely document this, and then make sure the code works that way :)

[stsewd]

Currently, users can specify a custom latest on the web admin, I think the major feature here is that user's don't want to maintain 2 branches/tags, say they want my-stable be just stable.

[humitos]

I think the major feature here is that user's don't want to maintain 2 branches/tags, say they want my-stable be just stable.

I think we don't want to add another setting for this only to support this case.

"If you want a custom stable version, create either a tag or branch in your project with that name."

I suppose that we can document this and just close this issue.

[stale[bot]]

This issue has been automatically marked as stale because it has not had recent activity. It will be closed if no further activity occurs. Thank you for your contributions.

[stsewd]

This can be closed in favor of https://github.com/rtfd/readthedocs.org/issues/5319, but we could still document that people can create a version named latest or stable

[humitos]

Yes. The only actionable thing missing from this issue is the documentation part https://github.com/rtfd/readthedocs.org/issues/3279#issuecomment-435141663

[agarwalrounak]

I will work on it.