Alabaster theme is unmaintained

[not-my-profile]

Alabaster is the default theme used by sphinx-quickstart. Unfortunately it is unmaintained. The last change to the theme was in 2018. In the meantime many pull requests were opened that fix actual problems but remain unmerged.

E.g:

• Remove underline from whitespace #188
• Fix horizontal scrolling on mobile #185
• Deprecate canonical_url in favor of html_baseurl #178
• Update alabaster.css_t #173
• Don't ignore Pygments background #169
• Remove redundant type="text/javascript" from <script> elements #164

I think it would be in the best interest of the Sphinx project if it would either take over maintainership of the Alabaster repository or fork it.

[mgeier]

See also #177 and #179.

[tk0miya]

Oh, I don't know that. We can accept the migration if @bitprophet wants it. But we also need to find new co-maintainers for Alabaster theme because we don't have enough resources for the maintenance.

[astrojuanlu]

And what about finding another default theme, such as @pradyunsg Furo? It's minimal, well designed, customizable, and perfect for small to medium sized projects https://furo.readthedocs.io/

[tk0miya]

I think changing the default theme is a different topic. We need to try maintaining the Alabaster theme at first. It's not too late to discuss the change after that.

[bitprophet]

Oh, I don't know that. We can accept the migration if @bitprophet wants it. But we also need to find new co-maintainers for Alabaster theme because we don't have enough resources for the maintenance.

Hi! Yea I figured that might be the case, which is yet another reason I've lagged on making this connection. But yes, hello - as noted, I definitely have less time for Alabaster than I used to & my own personal itches are mostly scratched for it. This isn't to say I don't have various things I'd like to tweak in it, nor that other users' issues aren't relevant, but it never makes it to the top of the list. Also doesn't mean it never will, but clearly there's demand for updates that aren't being met.

I don't remember seeing any specific individuals on my end who have shown an interest in taking over some responsibility. If the Sphinx team also doesn't have the bandwidth, I'm not sure what the best route is to finding somebody.

Relatedly, any nontrivial development on the theme will require coordinating updates to Sphinx's install requirements (re sphinx-doc/sphinx#1759) which IIRC was another reason I thought it might make sense for the core team to have a hand in Alabaster's release cycle. Backwards compat for a visual theme is a lot more complex than for regular code!

[introt]

Hello!

I'm not much of a somebody, but I'd be willing to go through the PRs and get at least the trivial backwards-compatible fixes merged & shipped.

I've already done some of that for my own use (albeit somewhat hastily, and mostly manually, as that made the most sense due to the renaming in addition to the existing merge conflicts), so demonstrably I know enough to get this party started.

You might get a better sense of my "self-appointed assistant (community) manager" capabilities by checking out my comments on these 200+ issues and PRs on the Zim Desktop wiki repo (138 closed out of 232). What I lack in skill, I make up for with enthusiasm - I'm also a learner of indeterminate speed.

Consider this my free-form application for co-maintainership of Alabaster proper. In my opinion migrating it to under Sphinx would make the most sense, since it's already so tightly integrated. I'm not looking to make any grand developments, just improve the out-of-the-box experience by merging the existing fixes, so much coordination won't be needed.

[AA-Turner]

I've asked Jeff if he is willing to transfer the repo to this org in #177 (comment).

A

[astrojuanlu]

https://github.com/sphinx-doc/alabaster/ got transferred