How to read older versions of the docs?

[amudh]

For a project, I need a specific version of the documentation. E.g., 8.1.0. Only the latest and stable versions are available, and other versions are disabled/removed. I went to this link directly: https://readthedocs.org/projects/pillow/versions/ and could only see those versions. Alternatively, I went to the docs folder on the repo but could only see the source of the documentation in .rst file formats.

How to get older versions? Meanwhile, I can refer to the latest version to get started. I would appreciate any help.

[Yay295]

It looks like other versions need to be manually activated. https://docs.readthedocs.io/en/stable/tutorial/#modifying-versions

[nulano]

IIRC it was a deliberate choice to deactivate old versions to improve SEO: #4549

[aclark4life]

Copy that, disabled 8.1.0 again.

[amudh]

I am not clear on the exact problems from issue link #4549. But, getting access to an older version of the documentation is a fairly common requirement. For example, Python documentation supports multiple versions. Is this a limitation of readthedocs.io?

[aclark4life]

getting access to an older version of the documentation is a fairly common requirement.

I don't know about requirement, but yes it's nice to have old versions available.

Is this a limitation of readthedocs.io?

It's up to us to decide what we want to do and RTD supports developers' efforts as best they can.

[radarhere]

If you would like, you can generate those versions of the documentation on your machine.

git clone [email protected]:python-pillow/Pillow
cd Pillow
git checkout 9.2.0
python3 -m pip install --force-reinstall .
make doc
open docs/_build/html/index.html

[amudh]

This seems to have worked. Thank you! Although there were couple of issues. One related to imageio module being incompatible with 8.1.0 tag. Since I only want the docs at this point, I ignored that. However for the make doc command to succeed, I had to manually install the following

pip install sphinx_rtd_theme
pip install sphinx_issues
pip install sphinx_removed_in

I now have the docs running locally.

[hugovk]

The .rst files should be fairly readable via the tag on GitHub:

https://github.com/python-pillow/Pillow/tree/8.1.0/docs

[aclark4life]

We can also manually activate older versions if need be, e.g. https://pillow.readthedocs.io/en/8.1.0/

[amudh]

Wow, this was easy. Thanks!

[SubaruArai]

I don't think this is working anymore

[radarhere]

This specific link was later disabled. See #6894 (reply in thread)