Re: broken links (intermittent)

On Tue, Sep 30, 2008 at 3:00 PM, Selena Deckelmann
<selenamarie(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:
> Good morning,
>
> I'm getting 404's every once in a while on paths through "current" that are
> "suggested links" from the main postgresql.org search page. For example:
>
> http://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/static/backup-online.html

Whoever maintains the docbot irc thingy needs to update some URLs by
the sounds of it.

> Could we put a more informative 404 message in place? A contextual one would
> be ideal. In this case, we could serve a "not found" page with a suggestion
> to check out the backups portion of the documentation.
>
> Or, maybe in this specific case there should just be a redirect to the top
> of the backups-related docs.

Not easily, if at all. The documentation is dynamically generated from
a database on the master server, which certainly doesn't know what
pages might have been present in previous releases, at least without
trawling through them all and trying to figure it out.

The frontend servers that you actually get the pages from are all
static servers that just serve the pre-generated HTML. They have no
way of dynamically generating a 404 page.

--
Dave Page
EnterpriseDB UK: http://www.enterprisedb.com