Set-up a cron job or python script to make daily 
rebuilds of the Python documentation at:  
www.python.org/dev/doc/devel

Developers using Windows and not using Cygwin do 
not have a method for doing their own builds.  

I think daily updates would be helpful for all 
developers and would increase the likelihood that 
people check their patches versus current 
documentation.

Also, it increases the chance that someone will notice 
and report a documentation error earlier in the 
release cycle.

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I don't think this is possible. Automatic rebuilding of the
documentation will likely fail frequently, because of errors
in the tex input.

OTOH, if somebody volunteers to produce the documentation
automatically somewhere in the world (and fixes errors found
during the rebuild), then it would be easy to mirror those
on python.org.

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I don't think failing frequently is a problem if the failure
shows up in someone's email.  It should probably go to
python-docs@python.org, and I can turn that into a fix. 
Perhaps it should go to the Doc-SIG instead, to allow more
people to help.

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With your new automation scripts is it now possible to run a
daily cron job?

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At this point it is trivial to checkout and build the
documentation automatically, with one caveat.  The script
would need to be able to do an authenticated checkout from
SourceForge, and needs to be able to log into the python.org
webserver as one of the webmasters to install the fresh tarball.

While an anonymous checkout of the documentation sources is
possible, it's out of date by several hours (as long as we
use SF's CVS).

That means the script needs to run within the context of an
ssh-agent with the right keys added, or the keys must not
have passphrases.

I'm too paranoid to live without passphrases on my private
keys, and I really haven't thought about how to run a cron
job such that it can use a properly populated ssh-agent, but
that seems conceptually fragile.  (Who *always* has such an
agent running, not just when logged in directly?)

The documentation build is too heavy a process to run on the
python.org webserver itself, and that still relies on being
able to do an authenticated checkout from SF.

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For a daily build, it is IMO sufficient to use the anonymous
CVS - it may be a few hours behind, but you'ld have to wait
a full day anyway for the changes to show up. If somebody
builds the documentation elsewhere, a cronjob on python.org
could pick it up from "elsewhere", which would mean no
access to python.org is necessary.

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Perhaps that's good enough, though I've generally done
updates from the latest CVS.

Would anyone object to my setting up a cronjob to perform
the build on starship?  It appears that sufficient software
is installed on that machine to perform the build (and much
faster than on anything I have).

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I'd have thought it was an entirely reasonable use of the
starship, but I guess you could ask on the crew list first
if you want to be really polite...

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Fred, I had thought you had made a job for this but it
doesn't appear to be running on a regular basis.

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This seems to have been done now, see
http://docs.python.org/dev/.