Re: Release Notes Archive Patch

On 2/13/19 11:18 AM, Tom Lane wrote:
> "Jonathan S. Katz" <jkatz(at)postgresql(dot)org> writes:
>> On 2/13/19 10:13 AM, Tom Lane wrote:
>>> The patch doesn't convey a lot to my mind, so I have to ask: exactly
>>> what URLs would this present?
>
>> I'm a bit confuse by the question, so I'll answer it from two angles.
>
> Neither of those are quite what I meant. As I understood Andres'
> complaint, it was that right now we have URLs like
>
> https://www.postgresql.org/docs/10/release-9-6-5.html
>
> but those are going to be 404 beginning tomorrow. It sounds from your
> response like this patch isn't meant to restore those cross-version URLs.
> Which is fine by me, really, but we might get pushback about it. If so,
> there might be material for follow-on work to redirect those into this
> new set of URLs

Thanks for clarifying!

So, in anticipation of push back, I also want to provide some stats. I
looked at overall traffic since Jul 1, 2018 to yesterday. Traffic to any
of the release notes in general was a very small chunk of it (< 0.5%).

When just looking at the subset of release notes, the top 5 receivers were:

1. 11.0
2. 10.5
3. 10.4
4. "current/static/release.html"
5. 9.6 release index

This constituted a little over 35% of the overall release note traffic.

My inferences are that people tend to go to the release notes for the
"latest" release.

Now, in terms of things like "/docs/9.5/9-4-19.html" and the like, the
only one that had significant traffic was
/docs/9.6/static/release-9-5.html, and that was #25 on the list (the
notes coming before it accounting for 60%+ of the traffic). In fact, I
did not see another of the "mismatch" URLs until #37 on the list, which
was /docs/10/static/release-9-5.html

From a user experience perspective, does it stink that we're potentially
creating a bunch of 404s? Yes. Is it going to upset some people? Yes,
and I'm sympathetic to that. However, looking at the overall numbers, I
think we'll be ok, even if we don't have the redirects per Magnus'
suggestion downthread (which I will also reply to).

>
>> WRT loading the release notes themselves, basically it is using the data
>> found in the current doc imports. Often in the release notes, there are
>> URLs either to older release notes (like in the top line) or various
>> features/sections of the documentation (e.g. a GUC, a SQL command, etc.)
>
> Right. The latter type will link to the main docs for the associated
> release, correct?

Correct.

Thanks,

Jonathan