Trying to speed up docs build with Docker

[john-science]

What is the change? Why is it being made?

The ARMI docs build on GitHub is failing or hanging a lot lately. I am testing out solutions.

SCR Information

Change Type: docs

One-Sentence Description: Trying to speed up docs build
One-Sentence Rationale: The doc build takes a long time, and slow CI can slow down projects.

One-line Impact on Requirements: NA

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Checklist

• This PR has only one purpose or idea.
• Tests have been added/updated to verify any new/changed code.
• The documentation is still up-to-date in the doc folder.
• The code style follows good practices.
• The dependencies are still up-to-date in pyproject.toml.

[john-science]

Okay, I am going to do some testing. I will rerun the docs build for this PR and record the time it takes for each attempt.

1. 19m 35s
2. 8 min - then FAILED
3. 20m 19s
4. 17m 16s
5. 19m 33s
6. 53 m 51s
7. ?

[opotowsky]

Most recent one was 53 min. Was that with the --fix-missing? This is a really sad state of affairs! What is causing this wild variation with apt-get update?!

[john-science]

Most recent one was 53 min. Was that with the --fix-missing? This is a really sad state of affairs! What is causing this wild variation with apt-get update?!

Yup, this was with --fix-missing.

I mean, I guess apt-get update and apt-get install are both slow and variable. But, the ARMI docs build needs to install pandoc and some latex stuff for the PDFs. Maybe I could try to install those manually, and that would solve the issue, I don't know.