.. _faq: ========================== Frequently Asked Questions ========================== Why another tool for versioning Sphinx docs? ============================================ While there are several sphinx extensions out there (e.g. `sphinxcontrib-versioning `_ or `sphinx-versions `_) none of them seem to work correctly with recent sphinx versions (as of March 2020). Their code heavily relies on monkey-patching Sphinx internals at runtime, which is error-prone and makes the code a mess. In contrast, the extension part of ``sphinx-multiversion`` does not do any fancy patching, it just provides some HTML context variables. How does it work? ================= Instead of running `sphinx build`, just run `sphinx-multiversion` from the root of your Git repository. It reads your Sphinx :file:`conf.py` file from the currently checked out Git branch for configuration, then generates a list of versions from local or remote tags and branches. This data is written to a JSON file - if you want to have a look what data will be generated, you can use the ``--dump-metadata`` flag. Then it copies the data for each version into separate temporary directories, builds the documentation from each of them and writes the output to the output directory. The :file:`conf.py` file from the currently checked out branch will be used to build old versions, so it's not necessary to make changes old branches or tags to add support for ``sphinx-multiversion``. This also means that theme improvements, template changes, etc. will automatically be applied to old versions without needing to add commits. Do I need to make changes to old branches or tags? ================================================== No, you don't. ``sphinx-multiversion`` will always use the :file:`conf.py` file from you currently checked out branch. What are the license terms of ``sphinx-multiversion``? ====================================================== ``sphinx-multiversion`` is licensed under the terms of the `BSD 2-Clause license `_. .. _sphinxcontrib_versioning: https://github.com/sphinx-contrib/sphinxcontrib-versioning .. _sphinx_versions: https://github.com/Smile-SA/sphinx-versions .. _bsd_2clause_license: https://choosealicense.com/licenses/bsd-2-clause/