[ARROW-13260] [Doc] Host different released versions of the documentation + version switcher

• Type: Improvement
• Status: Resolved
• Priority: Major
• Resolution: Fixed
• Fix Version/s: 8.0.0
• Component/s: Documentation
• External issue URL: https://github.com/apache/arrow/issues/28941
• Assignee: Unassigned
• Reporter: Joris Van den Bossche
• Created: 05/Jul/21 16:05
• Updated: 11/Jan/23 08:31
• Resolved: 07/Apr/22 16:07

Description

Related to ARROW-1299 for hosting the nightly docs, we could also keep the built docs for older versions instead of overwriting them at each release.

Currently, the built docs live in the apache/arrow-site repo (asf-site branch) in the "/docs/" subdirectory.

When releasing, we could add the newly built docs for that release in a subdirectory instead. Something like "/docs/5.0/" or "/docs/version/5.0".
(And we could retroactively add some docs of previous releases, if we want)

To make this useful for the user, we need a version switcher in the sphinx theme layout. There are other projects that use the same sphinx theme that have added this (see eg https://mne.tools/stable/index.html), and there is some work to upstream this to the base theme (but on the short term we could also copy such a custom implementation).

For the "stable" docs (latest release), we could either 1) keep a duplicated version of the latest built docs at "/docs/", or 2) symlink "/docs/" to "/docs/5.0/" (and update this for each release; although I am not sure this is possible since it's the other is a child directory).
We could also add a "/docs/stable/" and make this the default url.

cc amol- kszucs

Issue Links

• duplicates: ARROW-1921 [Doc] Build API docs on a per-release basis
• is cloned by: ARROW-2939 [Python] Provide links to documentation pages for old versions
• is cloned by: ARROW-5067 [Doc] Adding support for versioned documentation
• is duplicated by: ARROW-13411 [Doc][Python] Make docs release match arrow releases