Readthedocs.org: Show `pip freeze` during build

[goerz]

It would be really nice if there was a pip freeze as part of the build process immediately before cat docs/conf.py

This would have made figuring out what went wrong in https://readthedocs.org/projects/krotov/builds/8281165/ much easier. It was a broken update of the nbsphinx package. While in principle, the conda env create tells me the installed versions of some of the packages, its output is rather messy. With a pip freeze, it would be very easy to diff the logs of two builds to see which versions changed.

[goerz]

Of course, it would be even better if the readthedocs.yml allowed to specify the install/build commands, the way that e.g. .travis.yml or .appveyor.yml do.

[stsewd]

I think this would be a good addition :)

Of course, it would be even better if the readthedocs.yml allowed to specify the install/build commands, the way that e.g. .travis.yml or .appveyor.yml do.

Well, I think that is not the purpose of rtd (personal opinion), but our next version of the config file is more extensible and configurable.

[humitos]

Consider using conda list for conda environments and pip list for pip ones.

[agjohnson]

I'd probably be -1 on polluting the output with either of these. This is another CI feature I don't really think RTD needs

[goerz]

In my opinion, RTD desperately needs CI features. The crazy hoops I have to jump through to install dependencies and generate the documentation when a make docs would be right there is what's making me look very seriously at doctr.

[humitos]

I think this is a feature for what we can accept (and appreciate) a Pull Request, but currently it's out of our roadmap and the core team does not have the resources to start working on it.

[ericholscher]

This information is currently in the build output page (eg. the pip install). We had some bugs in the past where libraries were not being used correctly after being installed, which is where this feature would be useful. We believe we've fixed those issues, so we're going to close this issue now because we aren't likely to implement this.

Also for more complex builds, we're planning to implement #1083, which will let people upload docs via other CI mechanisms that are better suited for CI and building arbitrary environments.

[eric-wieser]

This information is currently in the build output page (eg. the pip install).

This unfortunately doesn't help if conda is used, which silences the pip install output.