Intersphinx support in toctrees

[xmo-odoo]

Currently, toctree links can be either internal documents or arbitrary external URLs.

For Sphinx projects which serve as hub of sorts, or to cross-TOC between related projects, it'd be nice if it were possible for toctree to use intersphinx when references are not found locally (and are not URLs)

[andreacassioli]

That would be nice. I agree.

[erget]

I just ran up against this wall myself - this would be a great feature!

[moorchegue]

+1!

[mniak]

+2!

[Tzaphkiel]

interrested as well !

[curtisma]

+3!

[moorchegue]

We missed this feature request's 5 year anniversary!

[ryanraba]

I need this also. For my purposes, there is a bit of a workaround though.

In conf.py, add:

os.system("wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/whatever/you/need/thefile")

This will pull down the file to the sphinx build directory whenever sphinx executes. Now in your toctree, just list thefile like any local file

Not actually using intersphinx at all

[davbeek]

+4!

[tsibley]

I'm interested in this functionality, and might be willing/able to implement it, but would love a quick feasibility check from someone more experienced with Sphinx first. Does anyone have a sense of what this would take to support? Does someone with experience with Sphinx internals and intersphinx think it's doable without sweeping design changes to toctree and/or intersphinx?

[tk0miya]

At present, there are no way to fetch toctrees of the external document because the inventory file (that is used to resolve the cross references by intersphinx) does not contain them. And intersphinx is only invoked on the resolving-phase. So there are no chance to insert external toctrees to the local one. So you need to design and implement the whole of features for this issue.

Additionally, we need to discuss how external toctrees are represented in non-HTML outputs. So I think it would be better to go to implement this as a 3rd party extension, at first.