Re: Release note trimming: another modest proposal

Jonathan S. Katz <jkatz@postgresql.org>

From: "Jonathan S. Katz" <jkatz@postgresql.org>
To: Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>
Cc: pgsql-docs@lists.postgresql.org
Date: 2018-08-06T16:45:31Z
Lists: pgsql-docs
> On Aug 6, 2018, at 11:47 AM, Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote:
> 
> "Jonathan S. Katz" <jkatz@postgresql.org> writes:
>> Though thinking on this further, we’d probably want to maintain the URLs
>> that have been generated through the years so they don’t all 404 at once.
>> That would require having the appropriate URL rules written out either in
>> pgweb itself or at the web server level.
> 
> I dunno, you think it's worth the trouble?  The whole premise of this
> proposal is that hardly anybody is looking at those pages.  If that's
> not the case, we shouldn't be doing this.

I took a look at the stats and directionally it’s incredibly low. More I get
concerned by introducing 404s that could hurt any SEO-related metrics,
but that could just be general concern vs. anything factual.

> OTOH, if we can easily set up a generic redirect rule like "if
> https://www.postgresql.org/docs/*/static/release-*.html
> doesn't exist, then redirect to
> https://www.postgresql.org/docs/old-release-notes/static/release-*.html"
> it might be worth doing.

And looking at how the docs are served, we could do this from pgweb,
which is fairly straightforward.

FWIW I’m thinking of something like:

`/docs/release-notes/release-X-Y(-Z)?.html`

and have them all live there. Of course the docs themselves would still
have their copy of the release notes, but we could at least have a single
repository of all the releases, which I do see on other OSS projects.

Jonathan

Commits

  1. Doc: in each release branch, keep only that branch's own release notes.