Bug#987943: www.debian.org: Developers Reference: Sphinx search non-functional: searchindex.js missing

Hi,

Holger Wansing <[email protected]> wrote (Sat, 25 Nov 2023 12:43:24 +0100):
> In the meantime things have evolved, Sphinx has changed its way to
> deal with this; see <https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=872944#74>
> 
> Thus, the current developers-reference built on a bookworm or later system
> leads to a output, where the search is working.
> Can be viewed at 
> <https://people.debian.org/~holgerw/sphinx-theme-for-debian/alabaster/developers-reference/>
> (also with a different html theme, BTW)
> 
> 
> So, when wolkenstein gets updates to bookworm (currently on bullseye)
> it will just, I guess.

Sorry, the above was complete nonsens, since for Developers Reference on the 
website we use the binary Debian package as a basis, which is built by
buildds, so on unstable. Thus the Sphinx version on wolkenstein is completely 
irrelevant.

I mixed that up with the release-notes, which I have worked on to migrate to
Sphinx: since there is no such package like 'release-notes' in the archive,
they in fact need to be built from scratch on wolkenstein.

So ...

$ time_machine start target=submitting-date

... we are back to the beginning:

Stefano Rivera <[email protected]> wrote:
> Sphinx search is broken on the developers reference:
> https://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/developers-reference/searchindex.js
> is 404.

Note: I'm working on debian-policy now, which has also switched to Sphinx;
as debian-policy shows the same problem, I think it's a systematic issue and
thus a solution for this will work for other sphinx-based manuals as well
(hopefully).

First, I focused on the symlinks to several .js scripts in _static, which point
to not existing targets. That has been mentioned at several places, and drawed
my attention.
After several attempts I have all those scripts existing now on the relevant 
place at https://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/_static/,
however the search is still not working :-((

But then --- guess what: the subject says it all:
"searchindex.js is missing" !

Indeed, that file is existing here after a local build of the package, but
is missing on our webserver.
That's because the 7doc script in webmaster's cron repo (to push /doc content on
the website) does only process html files in the root directoriy of the manual, 
no .js files.

I have prepared a build of debian-policy with all needed javascript scripts
and that searchindex.js file at
https://people.debian.org/~holgerw/new-rtd-sphinx-theme-for-debian/debian-policy/debian-policy/

Everything works fine there as far a I see (with a desktop firefox and brave
browser, as well as with the mobile versions of those browsers on my 
smartphone).
Feel free to test with more browsers/platforms/whatever.

I guess I will need to trim the 7doc script once again - hrrrr ...


So long
Holger