Issues when conf.py invokes git

I have been trying to use sphinx-multiversion but I am running into what seems like a blocking issue because my conf.py calls git internally. Basically, similar to https://protips.readthedocs.io/git-tag-version.html, we use git describe to get the version of the docs we should be building.

However, given what sphinx-multiversion does to copy a tree into /tmp, that fails as the tree copy isn’t a real git repo and the conf.py git commands fail.

Any suggestions on how to address this?

[Holzhaus]

I’ll try to come up with a PoC PR that will use git clone. By default it will use shallow clone, but that will be configurable.

[dolfinus]

Hello.

I’ve just faced with the same issue while building docs within docker container.

There is a conf.py script which fetches list of tags and passes it to Read The Docs template. If I run sphinx-multiversion on locak machine, ir works perfectly, but in case of docker container it fail due to lack of .git folder in tmp dir.

My suggestion is to provide additional script arguments for managing the way of making repo copies:

1. If argument is not provided, behavior remains unchanged - script uses git archive. Large repositories are happy because .git dir is not copied.
2. If arguments is provided, git clone is used. If someone is facing just the same issue with accessing .git folder, he/she will just pass this arguments and conf.py will start working as expected.