Re: "current" URL/link for Octave docs

[Andrew Janke]

On 7/8/20 9:34 PM, Kai Torben Ohlhus wrote:
> On 7/8/20 4:55 PM, Andrew Janke wrote:
>> On 7/7/20 10:14 PM, Kai Torben Ohlhus wrote:
>>> This feature already exists.  The latest GNU Octave documentation has
>>> always been available from
>>>
>>>    https://octave.org/doc/interpreter
>>>
>>> Now I am overhauling the website a little and added a more intuitive link
>>>
>>>    https://octave.org/doc/latest
>>>
>>> Thus "latest" and "interpreter" point to the latest version of the
>>> documentation now. [...]
>>
>> Cool! Thanks for adding the "latest" URL.
>>
>> It looks like this is implemented as an HTTP redirect, not an alias.
>> Would this work better as an alias? With a redirect, I think you get
>> less googlejuice, and when users are viewing these pages in a browser
>> and then copy the URL for sharing with other people or pasting in to
>> Stack Overflow answers or whatever, they end up getting the
>> version-specific URL, so the version-specific URLs are what end up
>> getting propagated into the world of discussion on the web.
>>
>> Cheers,
>> Andrew
>>
> 
> I see.  So far I did not regard this as a problem, as certain URLs are
> only valid for a certain Octave versions. For example, betacdf() moved
> in version 4.4 from core Octave to the OF statistics package.
> 
> Thus posting the URL
> 
>    https://octave.org/doc/v4.2.0/XREFbetacdf.html
> 
> qualifies for a permalink, while
> 
>    https://octave.org/doc/latest/XREFbetacdf.html
> 
> is just another broken link on the web as soon as "4.2.0" is no longer
> "latest".
> 
> Is there a better way to fix this?
> 
> Kai

Hrmm. That is an issue. And I have no idea how to fix it. I'll try to
find some time to think about this.

Cheers,
Andrew