Re: Cool URIs don't change - what should we do when removing and renamingpages?

On 18.04.2021 at 15:57, Rowan Tommins wrote:

> With the removal of PHP 5 information from the manual (which I approve
> of, by the way) a lot of pages have been, or will soon be, either
> removed or renamed. Unfortunately, this leads to two problems:
>
> * The URLs give a 404 page (and a really ugly 404 at that), even when
> there is a useful page we could direct readers to.
> * User notes on the deleted pages are orphaned.
>
> I noticed this because #2 in the list of "pages with the most notes" is
> currently this non-existent page:
> https://www.php.net/manual/en/soapclient.soapclient.php
>
> Until a few months ago, that was the manual page for the SoapClient
> class's constructor, but since PHP 8.0 removed "PHP 4-style"
> constructors, it is now at
> https://www.php.net/manual/en/soapclient.construct.php (which was
> previously a "this is an alias for..." stub).
>
>
> A simple solution is to have "soft redirects" similar to how aliases are
> documented - stub pages containing only a single language snippet, and
> possibly a "See also" section. I think we would need:
>
> * "This function no longer exists in maintained versions of PHP."
> * "This method no longer exists in maintained versions of PHP."
> * "This function has been renamed to"
> * "This method has been renamed to"
> * "This page has been moved to"
>
> This would hopefully be easy for translators to maintain, because they
> could just adjust the snippets centrally, and mark all the stubs as
> fully translated.
>
> There's no way I can see to batch move notes, but maybe moving them one
> by one and deleting some as we go is the way to go there anyway.
>
> What do you think?

The general issue is mostly addressed by Anna's 404 handling of legacy
pages (and the fact that it doesn't work is a separate issue).

The SOAP issue is slightly different, since these pages are basically
still available, so setting up stub pages might be a good idea.  An
alternative could be to set up special redirects for that in
<https://github.com/php/web-php/blob/master/include/errors.inc>.

Regarding the notes: as I understand it, these should generally not
persist for a long time.  Either they are useful, and then should be
integrated into the manual proper, or they are not useful, and then
should be deleted.  Maybe this is an opportunity to walk through the
respective notes?

And generally when removing extensions from the manual, it would be good
to walk through the respective notes and handle them as appropriate.  In
the SOAP case (and maybe others) this has unfortunately been overlooked.

Christoph