Re: Removing old news from webpages

I agree completely. I didn't realise this happened at the time, but I 
think it's very bad to delete the history. (a small portion has been 
restored already by some others, but the majority has not). Reading 
things like [1] is heartbreaking.

Thomas has been doing great work to modernize the website and make it as 
useful as possible for people in the present day. I don't doubt his 
rationale for this action, as he states it: to improve the presentation 
of the website to people in the present day.

Deletion was not an end unto itself, but an action intended to solve 
that problem. However it has introduced another problem which, whilst 
obviously not of interest to Thomas, is clearly of great concern for 
others; yourself, me, and at least Joe Brockmeier (these days writing 
for LWN).

I want to stress I disagree with the *action* taken to solve the 
problem, and not the problem itself: reverting this deletion doesn't 
mean we don't support Thomas and others goals of improving the website. 
It just needs to be achieved another way.

I think a solution which preserved the URIs but didn't necessarily host 
the material in that VCS (or even on www.debian.org) would be 
acceptable: so long as hitting the old URI redirected to something which 
served the content. That maintains the property that "cool URIs don't 
change"[1].

Putting in place a solution like this will take time, in the meantime 
the files must be restored.


[1] https://lists.debian.org/debian-project/2025/01/msg00000.html
[2] https://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI

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👱🏻	Jonathan Dowland
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🔗	https://jmtd.net