Hi, Gavin Smith wrote on Sat, Sep 30, 2023 at 08:10:01PM +0100: > On Sat, Sep 30, 2023 at 01:15:09PM -0500, G. Branden Robinson wrote:
>> 4. "They might have changed this by mistake." >> >> Sort of. I find the "html_node" name uglier, but if there's popular >> demand to switch it (back), I can see doing that for groff 1.24. > We'll change htmlxref.cnf to whichever URLs you decide to use going forward. > > If there are no links to the groff Texinfo HTML manuals anywhere on the > web, it doesn't matter, but it is likely there are at least some somewhere. Now that i see this bumpy ride explained at length, i realize the link on this overview page of mine is currently broken, too: https://mandoc.bsd.lv/links.html First paragraph, first line, second link ("manual"). Rather prominently featured because, well, groff is important. Here are a few more links to the established URI, in alphabetical order: https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/converting-a-man-page-with-pandoc.36706/ https://git.pwmt.org/pwmt/zathura/-/issues/258 https://github.com/asciidoctor/asciidoctor/issues/3992 https://github.com/jgm/pandoc/issues/5019 https://lists.defectivebydesign.org/archive/html/groff/2020-10/msg00066.html https://lwn.net/Articles/912260/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36066812 https://perldoc.perl.org/Pod::Perldoc::ToMan.txt https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/623970/writing-vietnamese-in-groff https://uu.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:1189607/FULLTEXT01.pdf https://www.illumos.org/issues/9367 https://www.reddit.com/r/groff/comments/gbfsx4/page_number_position/ ... In general, i think keeping URIs stable makes sense unless there are *very* strong reasons for changing them - for example, forceful loss of control over the domain name. or finding out that the old name violated a relevant standard. Isn't making a resource available in the long term at least half the purpose of a URI in the first place, if not more than half? Besides, i don't see how a directory name on a public webserver could possibly be related to internal file naming conventions in autotools makefiles. Argumably, https://www.gnu.org/software/groff/manual/html_node/ is even better than https://www.gnu.org/software/groff/manual/groff.html.node/ because it's more concise (a virtue in URIs) and less redundant (a vice in URIs) without lacking any information. The part of the path "groff/manual/groff" doen't really make much sense. Arguably, even /software/groff/manual/html_node/ is excessively wordy, but making it more concise and easier to remember is not a sufficient reason for changing it and breaking links. Probably it's best to go back to the link that has been in use for at least a decade - and for extra safety, maybe leave the longer path in place as an alias for a number of years before checking that no links to it remain on the web, then deleting the longer alias. Yours, Ingo
