Duplicate Environments - Find a New Way to Preview PRs?

[jukent]

The ReadtheDocs builds have all been failing on excessive memory consumption. A fix in #154 has been implemented to allow us to move forward on other PRs.

However this is an infrastructure band-aid that requires us to both have an environment.yaml file for the Conda builds and a requirements.txt file (names vary slightly) that PiP can read for the ReadtheDocs build.

Ideally we won't have duplication of the dependencies in 2 separate files. Let's investigate other approaches.

@brian-rose proposes that instead of Readthedocs, we build the PR on GitHub Actions (using the same build environment as our main build) and then display the rendered site on Netlify.

[brian-rose]

Thanks @jukent. I don't know if my proposed solution is feasible, but it would mirror how we preview PRs for the Foundations site. That site does not use Readthedocs because of the lack of support for JupyterBook. @andersy005 is working on documenting the Netlify-based preview workflow for Foundations over at ProjectPythia/pythia-foundations#85.

One question is whether we would lose any useful features from readthedocs. Since we're only using it for previews, as opposed to keeping track of different versions of documentation, my guess is that the answer is no. We just need something that will display the rendered html for our site in a way that's consistent with what we'll see after the PR is merged.

[brian-rose]

Closing the loop on this:

The bandaid solution in #154 is not needed anymore since #167 where we moved to GitHub Actions + Netlify for previews.

The final actions to close this are (I think):

1. Remove readthedocs and the pip environment file (no longer needed)
2. Update the screenshot and instructions on https://github.com/ProjectPythia/projectpythia.github.io/blob/main/CONTRIBUTING.md to show contributors what the preview link looks like now.