We are announcing the deprecation of redirecting index URLs (ending in /) to /README.html for all the projects that don't output an index.html file when building the documentation. The deprecation date is set on Monday, July 1st, 2024. After this date, projects not outputting an index.html file will fail their builds.

Deprecation timeline

We understand this change will affect a few hundred of projects, so we have a timeline to communicate this deprecation to our users effectively.

• Tuesday, May 28, 2024: Email project owners using this deprecated feature so they can take action.
• Monday, June 10, 2024: Do the first brownout (temporarily enforce this deprecation) for 12 hours: 00:01 PST to 11:59 PST (noon)
• Monday, June 17, 2024: Do a second brownout (temporarily enforce this deprecation) for 24 hours: 00:01 PST to 23:59 PST (midnight)
• Monday, June 24, 2024: Do a third and final brownout (temporarily enforce this deprecation) for 48 hours: 00:01 PST to 23:59 PST (midnight)
• Monday, July 1, 2024: Fully remove of redirecting index URLs to /README/html

We strongly recommend to update your projects before July 1st, 2024 to avoid any downtime.

How to update your project

There are different approaches that can be followed depending on the configuration of your project.

1. Migrate your Sphinx documentation to use master_doc = "index" instead of master_doc = "README". This can be done by re-structuring your documentation or by creating a symlink from of index.rst -> README.rst.
2. Rename the README.html as index.html once the build has finished using build.jobs.post_build

Note these are only two possible ideas, but there may be other ways to achieve the same goal.

Tip: you can create a redirect from /README.html to / to keep links pointing to the deprecated URL working.

Contact us if you have any questions, and let us know any inconvenient you may have with this change.