Read the Docs pointed `-f` at each package's mkdocs.yml from the repo
root. mkdocs resolves some settings relative to the current working
directory rather than to the config file, so building from elsewhere
looks for them in the wrong place -- and silently, because the paths are
valid, just wrong.
zarr-indexing hit this at v0.2.0: `pymdownx.snippets` has a relative
`base_path` of `[docs, examples]`, so `--8<-- "snippets/canonical_slice.py"`
resolved against the repo root and searched zarr-python's own docs/
rather than the package's. The build failed with SnippetMissingError
while `just docs-check` passed, because that runs from the package
directory.
Building from the package directory makes the Read the Docs invocation
identical to the local and CI ones, so a green build there means a green
build here. $READTHEDOCS_OUTPUT is absolute, so the cd does not affect
where the site lands.
Applied to all three packages. Only zarr-indexing is failing today;
zarr-metadata and zarr-http-server do not use snippets, so for them this
is preventive -- the hazard is any config resolved against the working
directory, and it would show up only on Read the Docs.
Assisted-by: ClaudeCode:claude-opus-5