Blog post: How do use vale with RTD

[ericholscher]

We should eventually add a linting step to builds, but lots of people want "linting", we should help them figure this out.

[humitos]

We've got a PR to setup codespell in our repository in readthedocs/readthedocs.org#11195. Maybe something to consider here as well.

[humitos]

One thing that I was thinking about this was: "do we want to run these lintings on Read the Docs and fail the build because of that?". I remember we used to have Sphinx's lincheck in our build workflow and we got tired of it because the build failed and we weren't able to see the preview or similar.

Maybe the vale/codespell check is a little different since with linkcheck we don't have control on the external links and it's a bit tedious that your build fails because something you didn't touch. However, spell checks are more related with the actual PR itself where the user has 100% control over it.

Thoughts?

[ericholscher]

I think it would work similar to our other build steps, where a non-zero exit code would fail the build.

[humitos]

Right, that's my point. Do we want to fail the whole build just because a typo? Would that be a good UX?

[ericholscher]

Presumably the tool would allow you to configure this? I don't think we want to change our expectations, but guide users into configurations that do what they want.