Runestone Academy release 9.0.0

[Bradley Miller]

All,

On Friday I released 9.0.0 of Runestone Academy.  This release is the culmination of a huge amount of work by many contributors this summer and indeed for the last several summers.  A lot of this work has been under the hood work to upgrade our infrastructure from a system I picked in 2011 to a modern web framework.  You will notice UI changes almost everywhere.  Much of this work has occurred incrementally, but the big change was the removal of the old “runestone” server.  We have already discovered a couple of bad links to icons that slipped through the cracks and there will undoubtedly be others.

Instructors, the best time to find and fix any remaining issues is the next few weeks!  If you are using RA this fall, please start early to make sure things work as expected.  

Authors, as of today everything has been rebuilt with the CLI 2.48.0.  I’m seeing a lot of PTX:DEPRECATE messages...

* PTX:DEPRECATE: (2026-07-30) the external directory is a property of your source, and is now declared with a

"directories/@external" attribute within "docinfo".  The publication file entry "source/directories/@external" is

honored meanwhile, but please relocate it.

All of the old books written in restructuredText (RST) now carry a warning in the library and on the course creation page.  (limited support) Those books have mostly been replaced with PreTeXt versions.  The current repo for Runestone does not even support building RST based books.  You must pip install runestone 7.13.8.  This means that old books will only get critical security or critical bug fix updates.

There is nothing like throwing away thousands of lines of old code, especially when that code was laden with technical debt!  Everything feels more solid, more maintainable, and hopefully more accessible for new contributors.  (We’ve also made progress on making the interactives more accessible in the a11y sense.  There is still plenty of work to be done polishing and adding new features, but it feels more manageable today than it did in May!

Thanks again to the many people who have contributed code, testing, ideas, and bug reports!

Brad

Brad Miller
Professor Emeritus, Luther College
Founder, Runestone Academy LTD
Blog: http://reputablejournal.com

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