Re: Documentation: Should we possibly have aliases for current stable and current devel?

[Jean Abou Samra]

Le lundi 13 février 2023 à 17:37 +0100, Lukas-Fabian Moser a écrit :

Hi,

From https://lilypond.org/help-us.html

“Mailing list support: answer questions from fellow users. (This may entail helping them navigate the online documentation; in such cases it may sometimes be appropriate to point them to version-agnostic URL paths such as [/latest/](https://lilypond.org/doc/latest/Documentation/notation) or /stable/, which are automatically redirected.)”

Thanks for pointing this out, I never knew about this.
But: If I open https://lilypond.org/doc/stable/Documentation/notation/proportional-notation.html, I get redirected to http://lilypond.org/doc/v2.24/Documentation/notation/proportional-notation.html - so if I copy the URL from my browser into an e-mail, I'm with a version-specific link again.
Wouldn't it be better (if that's at all possible) if the URL display in the browser could keep the explicit "stable" / "latest", and in turn add a button returning a permanent link to the page as currently displayed (which then contains the explicit version and language tag)?

Personally, I've long stopped using those links anyway. The problem is that when we make changes to the documentation, they turn into broken links. It's actually worse than that: assuming that your browser language is English, if a node is renamed in the English documentation, then a link with /latest/ will start displaying in a random non-English language because at least some of the translations (but usually these days, all translations but the French one) are lagging behind.

https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-lilypond/2022-10/msg00025.html

Much better would be a warning at the top of outdated documentation pages advising to go to the stable version documentation, like you can see on a number of projects, e.g.,

https://www.gnu.org/software/guile/docs/docs-2.2/guile-ref/Preface.html#Preface

or

https://tox.wiki/en/3.11.1/

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