Re: links to 12 release notes broken after branching

On 10/30/19 5:47 PM, Andres Freund wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> On 2019-09-17 13:50:40 -0400, Jonathan S. Katz wrote:
>> On 9/17/19 1:04 PM, Tom Lane wrote:
>>> Andres Freund <andres@anarazel.de> writes:
>>>> Yes, but before the release being done we can't hand that out?
>>
>> You can always hand them out knowing that it is subject to change.
>> Personally I view devel as "anything can change at a given moment".
> 
> It still baffles me that that's supposed to be a reasonable approach.

Why? "devel" is unstable by design. Let's say we add a new feature, and
the page is at /docs/devel/a/newfeature.html

Some discussion ensues on the mailing list, and we decide that it's
better to put the documentation in /docs/devel/b/newfeature.html

Suddenly, all old links to /docs/devel/a/newfeature.html break.

Could we add a redirect for it? Sure, but why would we account for every
possible permutation when we know that devel in itself is unstable?

> I
> mean, for quite a few weeks that's the only link available. And we want
> people to be able to look at the notes at that time. And expecting URLs
> to stay halfway stable isn't a novel or absurd thing in any sort of way.
> 
> I think the whole project of pruning the release notes was done hastily
> and carelessly. At a much larger scope than necessarily apparent from
> the mailing list discussions.

What would you suggest we do?

To kick off possible solutions, perhaps the policy is we keep the
"/docs/devel/release-13.html" around in "master" after the REL_13_STABLE
branch is created.

We keep that around until the time that 13.0 comes out, and then it is
removed to make way for release-14.html

Does that work? What is the overhead of maintaining that in core?

I don't think this would be too painful in pgweb -- if I read the code
correct, this may even be a no-op.

Thanks,

Jonathan