Inventory-download workaround has no tracking issue or limitations entry #146

Tracks upstream friction in the docs toolchain. CONTRIBUTING.md documents a carried workaround — the *_OBJECTS_INV environment variables — with no tracking issue and no entry on docs/contributing/upstream_limitations.md, so the project's two-artifact rule is not satisfied for it.

The friction

The documentation build downloads Sphinx object inventories so cross-references to Python, Pydantic, and TinyDB resolve to links. Read the Docs has put its site behind a Cloudflare bot challenge that rejects mkdocstrings' mkdocstrings/0.15.0 user agent, so the TinyDB inventory download fails:

mkdocstrings: Couldn't load inventory ... HTTP Error 429: Too Many Requests

The workaround we carry

mkdocs.yaml reads each inventory URL from an environment variable, so a contributor who hits the challenge can point the build at a locally downloaded objects.inv:

Documented in CONTRIBUTING.md under "Build Documentation".

Reproduction

There is nothing to run: the finding is that two required artifacts are missing, not that code misbehaves. The evidence is their absence.

$ gh issue list --state all --search "inventory"

$ gh issue list --state all --search "429"

$ grep -rn "OBJECTS_INV\|objects.inv" docs/contributing/upstream_limitations.md

$ grep -c "OBJECTS_INV" CONTRIBUTING.md mkdocs.yaml
CONTRIBUTING.md:5
mkdocs.yaml:4

The first three commands print nothing: no issue tracks this, and the limitations page does not mention it. The fourth confirms the workaround is real and shipped.

The environment-variable failure itself is environmental (it depends on whether Cloudflare challenges your IP) and so is not reproducible on demand.

Environment: tinydantic 0.4.0 at 39b616c, mkdocs-include-markdown-plugin 7.3.0, Python 3.10.20, macOS. Checked 2026-08-13.

What to decide

docs/contributing/upstream_limitations.md scopes itself to TinyDB and Pydantic (line 5). Whether docs-toolchain friction belongs on that page is a maintainer call, and the same question covers the existing mkdocstrings-python issue #131, which is also absent from it. Three options:

1. Widen the page to a third section for the docs toolchain, and record both this and upstream(mkdocstrings-python): merge_init_into_class labels inherited __init__ with a .venv path #131 there.
2. Keep the page scoped to runtime dependencies and state that scope explicitly, moving the two-artifact obligation for toolchain friction to issues alone.
3. Treat the Cloudflare challenge as environmental rather than upstream friction, and drop the obligation for it — in which case say so on the page so the next audit does not re-raise it.

What was not done

Nothing was filed with Read the Docs or mkdocstrings, and no fix was attempted. The searches above were run; the 429 itself was not reproduced.

Found as a follow-up of the 2026-08-13 docs and docstring audit.

Assisted-by: Claude:claude-opus-5