Template: nav.homepage.url on 404.html template not set

[squidfunk]

I have a 404.html defined in Material for MkDocs which does not include the nav.homepage.url in Jinja - it's just empty. On all other pages it correctly points to the home page. Is this correct? In my view this value should also be accessible from non-base templates.

Also reported in squidfunk/mkdocs-material#127

[waylan]

I'm guessing this is related to the issues discussed in #77 (my comments on that issue explain how the system works and why it needs to work differently for error pages). The same relative/absolute problems would exist and pointing to the "homepage" in an error page template would be slightly different than with any other page. It may be that we don't have a reference to the "homepage" because it would be useless anyway. But I'll need to take a closer look to be sure.

[squidfunk]

Thanks for your first estimation. Maybe you can post a workaround, because it's really annoying that the 404 page doesn't really return to the homepage. Please keep in mind that it needs to be relative to the root, as some documentation is hosted in subdirectories (e.g. GitHub pages).

[waylan]

I'm almost certain this is related to the fix for #77. I haven't tested, but if the homepage is at the server root (/), then we may have a bug which returns an empty string instead (see nav.py L100: abs_url.rstrip('/') would return an empty string if abs_url == '/'). Presumably when I added that I assumed abs_url would never equal '/', so we just need to test and confirm whether that is possible.

[waylan]

Maybe you can post a workaround

You can hardcode the homepage URL in your template. Not ideal, but until the fix gets released, I'm not sure what else you can do. This is a bug that I overlooked when fixed #77.

Please keep in mind that it needs to be relative to the root, as some documentation is hosted in subdirectories

Actually, an error page can't have relative links for the reasons explained in #77, which is what makes this really tricky to get right. For a full explanation, please see #77.

[squidfunk]

Thanks for fixing this in master. Milestone is 1.0.0, so when is the release to be expected? Would be awesome if this would make it into a bugfix release, because the issue is pretty annoying.

Edit/note: just discovered the fact that an empty base_url also breaks the search in my (and probably every) theme, as it must load the search_index.json relative to base_url.

[waylan]

@squidfunk we are in beta (thus version < 1.0) so every release thus far has been a feature release (with bugfixes). With the last release (0.16) we indicated that the next release we do will be 1.0. There is a lot of work we need to get done, so the timeframe is when the work is done. I suppose we could do a 0.16.1 release, but we've never done point releases before. I've always assumed we would wait until after 1.0 before moving to that model. Any thoughts @d0ugal?

just discovered the fact that an empty base_url also breaks the search in my (and probably every) theme, as it must load the search_index.json relative to base_url.

That's a valid concern. I'm going to reopen this issue to make sure we don't forget to fix this.

[squidfunk]

I suppose we could do a 0.16.1 release, but we've never done point releases before.

There already is a 0.16.1 and also 0.15.x releases. You don't have to release it immediately, but a 0.16.2 bugfix release when a few more bugs where fixed would be awesome. The version semantics would be correct according to MAJOR.MINOR.PATCH, as it would be a bugfix release. However, just my point of view. Thanks for all the hard work.