Primary navigation is flickering

[amotl]

Problem

After just ramping up cloud-docs in development mode to refresh the all-features branch (crate/cloud-docs#88), we observed flickering on the primary navigation element (left hand menu).

Observations

We can slightly remember hearing @bmunkholm briefly talking about that observation today. Is it true or are we mixing things up?

[amotl]

We've observed while this is happening, the sphinx-autobuild service is also spinning. In those cases, it reloads itself continuously, and the webserver that restarts its socket causes the flickering on the browser's end.

[amotl]

The [restart] loop feels like it is a flaw in sphinx-autobuild I may have observed the other day already. At those spots, I solved it easily by downgrading.

• Sandbox: Update build environment to use Node.js 22 #571 (comment)

More references:

• docs-bug: endless loop of docs:live_preview eclipse-score/score#298
• Server perpetually restarts after rebuilding documentation sphinx-doc/sphinx-autobuild#120
• only write the image if it changed GRID4EARTH/healpix-geo#46
• Fix infinite loop when running make run canonical/anbox-cloud-docs#306
• doc: fix infinite loop for make run canonical/microcloud#683
• doc: fix looping local sphinx-autobuild canonical/lxd#14937
• Infra: don't let generated numerical.rst trigger rebuild loop python/peps#4103

[amotl]

At those [other] spots, I solved it easily by downgrading, like that, but it might also have been a different problem.

# Most recent 2024.2.4 has errors on live reloading.
sphinx-autobuild==2021.3.14

[amotl]

crate-docs 2.1.5 now defines the dependency like sphinx-autobuild>=2024.