[Python-Dev] [Webmaster] A broken link! (original) (raw)

Nick Coghlan ncoghlan at gmail.com
Sat Sep 10 12:57:25 EDT 2016

On 11 September 2016 at 01:27, Steve Holden <steve at holdenweb.com> wrote:

Hi Karen,

Thanks for your note. I just checked the source of the document in question, and it appears that link has been changed to reference https://www.mercurial-scm.org/guide, so it appears that we may be publishing an out-of-date document there. I'm copying this reply to the python-dev list, and the release manager may or may not choose to update the published version.

There's a problem with the way we're publishing our docs, but it's probably more that we're not emitting canonical URL tags that tell search engines to drop the major version qualifier from the links they present in search results: https://bugs.python.org/issue26355

This means that even folks using newer versions of Python may land on older versions of the docs if that's what a search engine happens to present for their particular query.

I haven't personally found the time to follow up on that idea with an actual implementation, but it would presumably be a matter of tinkering with the Sphinx theme and/or conf.py file (even for the no longer supported versions of the docs).

Cheers, Nick.

P.S. Although in this case, it may have just been a direct link to the 3.2 version of the 3.2 What's New - there isn't a lot we can do about that, as when a branch goes unsupported, we usually stop updating the docs as well (even when external links break)

-- Nick Coghlan | ncoghlan at gmail.com | Brisbane, Australia

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