Can we not put it in gallery instead? Or if it were mpl_examples, then some of the lines that were changed would not have been necessary.

Whatever it becomes, I don't like the auto_ prefix; it's an internal concern and doesn't really make any sense to present that in the URL to a user from a semantic point of view.

It's the default and is a convention followed by many (if not all) the projects. I'd rather stick with it for consistency.
We can't rename this to mpl_examples as mpl_examples still exists.

I'm not sure those are compelling reasons. I went back through the blame 7 years and couldn't find any reasoning behind it (that's not to say that there wasn't one.) My reasoning here is that URLs should be discoverable, simple, and at least try to give some semantic meaning.

A user might go to matplotlib.org/gallery or matplotlib.org/examples directly (yes, there's Google, but let's assume they're not using it for some reason), but there's a 99% chance that no-one will spontaneously go to matplotlib.org/auto_examples.

And what does the "auto_" prefix mean? It means that the rst was automatically generated from the example Python code. This is a meaningless distinction to a user. When they see "auto", they see "automatically generated" aka "not hand-written" aka "not very good". I'm not going to claim that all of our examples are 100% clear, but they've all been hand-written in some fashion, and some of them are even quite amazing.

In fact, for that same reasoning, I've just talked myself into retracting the "mpl_examples" suggestion, since the "mpl_" prefix is redundant and meaningless in this context. Also, our existing site uses matplotlib.org/examples/ and matplotlib.org/gallery.html; I don't think we should break that.

For the time being, the folder cannot be neither "examples" nor "mpl_examples", and this will not change in the foreseeable future considering the state of our examples (unless we remove all examples that are not SG compatible).

It's not possible to rename the current examples/mpl_examples to make room for the gallery-based examples? I strongly dislike the auto_examples name as well--I've overridden that name for sphinx-gallery in my own projects.

Will this end up exposed in the URL?

If so, I think we should pick something either a) shorter (ex sg or ae) or b) something more meaningful.

I does show up in the URL, for example this is our gallery at MNE-python. It does have auto-examples in the page, though that's sorta become the convention with sphinx-gallery (same goes for scikit-learn: http://scikit-learn.org/stable/auto_examples/index.html).

I seem to remember conversations with folks that this was a non-trivial thing to change but I could be wrong...it's been working out well enough for us. If you want you could use an .rst file that contains the gallery itself, then the objects that the gallery links to would be in the auto_examples folder.

Nope, it's completely trivial to change: https://unidata.github.io/MetPy/examples/index.html

I'm going to argue one more time NOT to use auto_examples. Whether they're generated automatically or not is immaterial to the user, so we should NOT be bleeding that implementation detail of our documentation build procedure to the outside world.

It's not that trivial, because matplotlib somehow does I don't know what in the plot directive that makes this a pain in the butt to change. Which is why I asked for feedback a month ago.

FWIW I'll give this a shot to change the name to examples_gallery. It doesn't look completely trivial in the sense that there are links hard-coded all over the codebase. There are also some weird errors happening inside the plot directive that I can try to debug. I'll open a separate PR then if I can figure it out.

Blank line after.