Re: Removed pages under /releases/

On Wed, 24 Jan 2024 09:45:46 +0100,
Thomas Lange<[email protected]> wrote:

(First, no need to CC me, I read the list) - 

>Hi Andreas,
>
>another reason that I forgot was that we had too many versions of the
>installmanual and the release notes. For many old releases we've kept
>them in 14 languages for every architecture (around 10) for each old release.
>E.g.:
>https://web.archive.org/web/20230625201750/https://www.debian.org/releases/jessie/releasenotes
>https://web.archive.org/web/20230625201754/https://www.debian.org/releases/jessie/installmanual
>
>
>That made our own search engine produce very bad results, because
>often if shows results for old releases instead on hits from the
>newest installation manual. Our search engine cannot sort the result
>by date btw. Someone said we should fix this problem,
>but as noone worked on this I tried to produce better results by
>removing old content. I don't think that many people need the old
>version of the installation manual of releases, that are not supported
>by Debian or even by the LTS people any more. Do you think that people
>need the release notes because they want to install Debian jessie
>nowadays? We always have archive.org or softwareheritage for thoses
>information.

Ah, that is a very much better explanation to why the content has been
removed, yes. That indeed answers my questions. Of course I don't think
that it is wrong, IF it has a good reason (which I've got here). Thank
you!

But, with that said - communication could probably have been better.
As you probably have seen, some of the translators have re-added the
translations after you have removed them, which obviously shouldn't be
done.

(I won't of course re-add the Swedish ones now, after your explanation).

>
>In the past we've built every release note for two (or was it three?)
>releases 6 times a days regardless if the sources of the release notes
>had changed or not. I improved the build time a lot by adding code
>that only build them (for all languages and architectures) if
>something changed. Maybe you remember this improvement.

I do, and I thank you for it.

>
>I try to have the point of view from the user of our web pages. If
>they look or search for information on our web pages and get old and
>outdated search results, then our web page is useless for them. The
>ratio of old to new content on our webpages was very bad in the
>past. That's why I try to remove old content.
>

Thanks for the explanation - I appreciate it.

-- Andreas Rönnquist
[email protected]
[email protected]