Re: Release note trimming: another modest proposal

Hi,

On 2019-02-05 12:10:57 -0500, Tom Lane wrote:
> Andres Freund <andres(at)anarazel(dot)de> writes:
> > On 2019-02-05 08:50:16 -0500, Jonathan S. Katz wrote:
> >> The original thought process was to _not_ do that given the effort, but
> >> if it's just for `/current/` it may not be so bad.
>
> > I think it definitely should also be on /devel/, that's what's out there
> > on blog posts and such. I am flummoxed that we're just giving up google
> > juice by willy nilly returning 404 for stuff that's more widely linked
> > than the average page. It's not like we are that good placed in searches
> > (although that's primarily related to other things).
>
> I thought there was some concern that we were deoptimizing by having
> multiple copies of substantially the same page.

I think that's an independent issue, given that the rest of the docs are
largely duplicated between the versions too.

> For something like release-9-6-10.html, there's no value in having it
> appear in three or four different places. You can't even argue that
> the later branches might be more up-to-date: that text is *the same*,
> modulo toolchain-forced markup differences, in every branch; or at
> least if it isn't it means I screwed up.

If somebody proposed adding automatic redirects from the older linked
versions to the newest /current/ URL with that version's release notes,
I'm not sure I would have argued against that. But I do *not* think
it's actually accurate they are the same - it's a significant difference
that they're linking to the corresponding version's pages, because those
will contain that version's syntax / docs.

Greetings,

Andres Freund