binder notebook copy problem when examples_dirs and gallery_dirs are strings instead of list

[lesteve]

Yeah first bug report ;-)! I thought I tried on scikit-learn before the release but actually I did not try configuring binder fully ...

Note that there is a work-around in conf.py of using a list with a single element.

diff --git a/doc/conf.py b/doc/conf.py
index 773afba..edc39d9 100644
--- a/doc/conf.py
+++ b/doc/conf.py
@@ -332,8 +332,8 @@ sphinx_gallery_conf = {
     'reference_url': {
         'sphinx_gallery': None,
         },
-    'examples_dirs': examples_dirs,
-    'gallery_dirs': gallery_dirs,
+    'examples_dirs': examples_dirs[0],
+    'gallery_dirs': gallery_dirs[0],
     'subsection_order': ExplicitOrder(['../examples/sin_func',
                                        '../examples/no_output',
                                        '../tutorials/seaborn']),

Output:

Exception occurred:
  File "/home/local/lesteve/miniconda3/lib/python3.6/shutil.py", line 309, in copytree
    names = os.listdir(src)
FileNotFoundError: [Errno 2] No such file or directory: '/home/local/lesteve/dev/sphinx-gallery/doc/a'
The full traceback has been saved in /tmp/sphinx-err-slqy8rcw.log, if you want to report the issue to the developers.

IIRC somewhere in the code example_dirs and gallery_dirs are turned into a single element list if they are strings and that it happens quite early in the code. I am not sure why but it looks like the binder logic is independent of that for some reason.

Found in scikit-learn (which does specify neither example_dirs nor gallery_dirs so get the default 'examples' and 'auto_examples').

Edit: 'a' is the first item of 'auto_examples' hence the folder '/home/local/lesteve/dev/sphinx-gallery/doc/a'