make a public website

i looked into making a website for this using Gitlab pages. Boy, was that a disappointment. I am used to the Python world where I just hack together my README files into some Sphinx documentation, for example the Monkeysign documentation that is built from an included README file and a separate doc tree which has symlinks to import regular file content (e.g. the CONTRIBUTING file).

I figured I would try something different and, having heard good things about it, tried out Pelican. That was a huge struggle. It was difficult to make it work at the root of the tree without major modifications and having python config files lying around. Furthermore, title metadata is mandatory, which means we can't just reuse existing files without modifying them, which in turn makes them have garbage on top because Gitlab doesn't parse that metadata properly (Github does, but as a table and that's not much prettier). This attempt was abandoned but still lives in the pelican branch in the git repo.

Then I figured, what the heck, this is a golang project, so let's try the golang SSG, Hugo. This was even worse of a failure. I couldn't make it read pages from the root at all: i had to fit in the hierarchy straightjacket. Things go in site/content/ then posts/ and about/. Even in about/, I couldn't make the README render at all. At most I was able to render the title, but never the content. So out with Hugo as well....

Finally, I think we may want to use Sphinx after all... Sphinx allows a much more flexible file structure, and I'm used to it. We would have to force it to parse our markdown or convert to rst, but that seems like a lesser evil when compared to the above nightmares. That said, theming support isn't as good as the other SSGs, but since no graphic design volunteered (yet?) with a shiny design to integrate, i don't think we have an urgent need for special theming.

For now, I'll just leave this dormant - the README will have to do, thank you very much.