Automatic checks for docs changes

[ericvalcik]

Create automatic checks for changes in referenced documentation. Add a time-triggered check for documentation changes. Travis build fails if documentation was changed.

[ericvalcik]

I just got another idea. What if the script for this feature would have a separate branch.

We would set a Cron job to this branch, and let the docs checker live alone in this branch. The notification setting would be easier like this because we would have two .travis.yml files. We wouldn't have to add any more code to the current Makefile and the periodic builds wouldn't have to build the entire repo every time.

Tell me what do you think.

[mukrop]

I did not expect the cron job would build the whole repository. If we used Travis I would try to construct a conditional to just run the docs check (e.g. if travis-cron then ...).

However, it may be far easier to run the docs-checker using GitHub Actions. It's free and baked right into GitHub. Still quite new (so by far not as powerful as Travis) but has a much more elaborate system of pipelines and triggers (you can define multiple build recipes with different triggers running independently).

• Downside: Splitting the build process on two platforms (at least for now).
• Upside: The two builds have very different functionality and core (ruby vs. python), so running independently on different machines may actually be an efficient step.

Al in all, I would suggest you look into GitHub actions now to find out if it's good for us. We may eventually migrate the whole build process there but that is for decision later.