Sphinx documentation no longer available online (apt.alioth.debian.org unavailable)

[Peter Odding]

While working on the development of a Python package I created (deb-pkg-tools) that uses python-apt and refers to its documentation I noticed that the online documentation seems to have disappeared...

This makes it impossible for my project to cross-reference the python-apt documentation, something that used to work fine a few months ago :-(. Here's what Sphinx has to say on the matter:

$ make docs
Running Sphinx v1.8.1
loading translations [en]... done
loading pickled environment... done
loading intersphinx inventory from https://apt.alioth.debian.org/python-apt-doc/objects.inv...
WARNING: failed to reach any of the inventories with the following issues:
WARNING: intersphinx inventory 'https://apt.alioth.debian.org/python-apt-doc/objects.inv' not fetchable due to <class 'requests.exceptions.ConnectionError'>: ('intersphinx inventory %r not fetchable due to %s: %s', 'https://apt.alioth.debian.org/python-apt-doc/objects.inv', <class 'requests.exceptions.ConnectionError'>, ConnectionError(...))

When I look at https://readthedocs.org/projects/deb-pkg-tools/builds/6801480/ I can see that in February 2018 this was still working fine, but the domain apt.alioth.debian.org no longer resolves.

It might be that the documentation has moved somewhere else, without a redirect in place, however I spent more than an hour looking and couldn't find the new location (if it exists):

1. https://pypi.org/project/python-apt/ links to the broken domain.
2. http://www.sphinx-doc.org/en/master/examples.html also links to the broken domain.

Would it be possible to make the Sphinx based documentation on python-apt available online again? Personally I have good experiences with Read The Docs and I'd love to see https://python-apt.readthedocs.io/ be brought into existence 😇.

[Peter Odding (peterodding)]

For whatever it's worth: I wouldn't mind spending a bit of time trying to set up https://python-apt.readthedocs.io/ based on the git repository at https://git.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/python-apt, although I can't tell if this plan will actually work without trying it (for example I don't know if the dependencies of the documentation build will be available in the RTD environment).

PS. The "information type" change was unintended, which explains why I reverted it; I didn't realize that my (accidental) mouse click would change the bug report without some form of confirmation...