[self-follow-up] At 2023-09-30T15:59:13-0500, G. Branden Robinson wrote: > I concede that having a working "/html_node/" URL by hook or by crook > (or by symlink) is probably a good idea given the list of URLs linking > to it that you presented above.
I find I have a problem with this after all, or at least with a subset of it. The problem is that the URLs for the node-based HTML rendering are dependent on the titles/names of the nodes in the document, and those are not stable. (They should not be expected to be, unless a Texinfo manual in this format should not be put in a public location until it is frozen in some manner, which is tautologically a pretty inflexible approach.) I see that GNU Autoconf, for examples, keeps versioned URLs of older revisions of its manual online. https://www.gnu.org/software/autoconf/manual/autoconf-2.60/html_node/Programming-in-M4sh.html Autoconf 2.60 is pretty long in the tooth--recklessly using the technique that recently pantsed me regarding groff's own release history,[1] it looks about 17 years old. So while changing the name of the directory back to html_node will fix some broken link problems, it won't fix them all, and it won't be robust in the face of future development. I'm fairly neutral on the "html_node" vs. "groff.html.node" naming issue, but I'm downright _opposed_ to limiting my (or future contributors') flexibility in updating, expanding, reducing, or otherwise mutating the node names of the groff Texinfo manual. Those shackles are much too tight. I don't want to go to the GNU site admins with requests to set up unmaintainable-in-CVS symbolic links (or HTTP redirects in the web server, whatever they think best) to resurrect some dead links until we've decided this issue. So here's what I propose. A. Put the groff 1.22.4 manual back online, probably as https://www.gnu.org/software/groff/manual/groff-1.22.4/html_node/ ...and have https://www.gnu.org/software/groff/manual/html_node/ symlink/redirect to it. That would fix the following links. https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/converting-a-man-page-with-pandoc.36706/ https://lists.defectivebydesign.org/archive/html/groff/2020-10/msg00066.html [defectivebydesign.org is gnu.org in disguise] https://uu.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:1189607/FULLTEXT01.pdf As well as the following "deep links". https://www.gnu.org/software/groff/manual/html_node/gtroff-Output.html#gtroff-Output from https://git.pwmt.org/pwmt/zathura/-/issues/258 https://www.gnu.org/software/groff/manual/html_node/Page-Control.html#Page-Control from https://github.com/asciidoctor/asciidoctor/issues/3992 https://www.gnu.org/software/groff/manual/html_node/Man-usage.html from https://github.com/jgm/pandoc/issues/5019 https://www.gnu.org/software/groff/manual/html_node/History.html from https://lwn.net/Articles/912260/ https://www.gnu.org/software/groff/manual/html_node/preconv.html#preconv from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36066812 http://www.gnu.org/software/groff/manual/html_node/Using-Symbols.html from https://perldoc.perl.org/Pod::Perldoc::ToMan.txt https://www.gnu.org/software/groff/manual/html_node/ms-Strings-and-Special-Characters.html#ms-Strings-and-Special-Characters from https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/623970/writing-vietnamese-in-groff https://www.gnu.org/software/groff/manual/html_node/Setting-Registers.html from https://www.illumos.org/issues/9367 https://www.gnu.org/software/groff/manual/html_node/ms-Headers-and-Footers.html from https://www.reddit.com/r/groff/comments/gbfsx4/page_number_position/ (All of these links to the groff's Texinfo manual were identified by Ingo. As he pointed out, there are surely more.) Okay, I am reminded why the suits hate deep linking. :-| B. ...well, let me look a little deeper into what GNU Autoconf is doing. First let's see what people think of part (A). Regards, Branden [1] https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/autoconf/
signature.asc
Description: PGP signature
