Request for community input: removing versioned docs

[Aaron Meurer]

Hello all.

I would like input from the broader SymPy community here. Right now,
at http://docs.sympy.org/ we have versioned docs for each version
going back to 0.6.7, e.g., http://docs.sympy.org/0.7.3/index.html.

I am proposing to remove these. The only docs that would be on the
docs site are http://docs.sympy.org/latest/ (the default) and
http://docs.sympy.org/dev/ (built automatically from master). I am
undecided if existing versioned docs pages should be setup to redirect
to latest, provide a message, or just 404.

Two reasons why I want to do this:

- Empirically, many users end up on old docs pages, without
intentionally going there. Google search likes to return search
results from old docs pages. We have attempted to use the webmaster
tools to fix this, but just playing around with some random search
terms, it seems they still appear in the top of the results (e.g.,
"sympy ln" gives 0.7.1 docs as the first result).

- This gives the false impression that we support older versions. We
do not support any version of SymPy other than the latest version. We
do not make backport releases, except in extreme situations.

I am looking for feedback on this, whether you think it's a good idea,
a bad idea, or any suggestions.

Aaron Meurer

[Francesco Bonazzi]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_301

[Nathan Goldbaum]

Hi Aaron,

A while back we modified our sphinx theme to add a "canonical" link:

https://github.com/yt-project/yt/blob/master/doc/source/_templates/layout.html#L4

After waiting for the googlebot to reindex our docs, google now seems to do a good job of only linking to our stable docs (which live at yt-project.org/doc).

Maybe sympy could do the same?

-Nathan

Aaron Meurer

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[Björn Dahlgren]

On Thursday, 22 June 2017 21:38:28 UTC+2, Aaron Meurer wrote:

I am looking for feedback on this, whether you think it's a good idea,
a bad idea, or any suggestions.

I am +1 on removing them. If that is too harsh: one could also keep a archive of old docs
under e.g. docs.sympy.org/archive, with a banner stating that it is unsupported,
and with a robots.txt file asking search engines not to index that folder.

[Aaron Meurer]

Our docs are hosted statically on GitHub pages, so I believe the only
way to do redirects is like we do currently
https://github.com/sympy/sympy_doc/blob/d8a3a2c81f4f26757f0be8699b7c3881b9b4147d/index.html.

Aaron Meurer

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[Jason Moore]

It seems that many other scipy related packages handle this by giving big warnings at the top of old doc pages to manually redirect you. This seems to work for me the vast majority of the time, only occasionaly to I get stuck on old, for example. Readthedocs does this for your automatically too and has a nice sidebar that tells you what version of the docs you are on.

I'm not in favor of removing old docs because it is a real pain for the user to build old docs. I'd be more in favor of warnings on old doc pages.

[Shekhar Prasad Rajak]

I think it will be good to have big warnings at the top of old doc pages, as Jason Moore said.

--

Shekhar

[Arihant Parsoya]

I am +1 for removing them.

[Francesco Bonazzi]

I guess we should somehow make Google aware that we want the docs of the "latest" version of SymPy to be the default search results. A big warning will probably not solve this problem.

I support a total removal and a permanent redirection to the latest version.

On Thursday, 22 June 2017 15:38:28 UTC-4, Aaron Meurer wrote:

[Aaron Meurer]

That's what I tried with the webmaster tools. I tried looking now, and
I can't even find it anymore. I think the ability to change it might
have been removed.

Aaron Meurer

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[Ondřej Čertík]

It would be nice to be able to access the old documentation online.
Say you have some older version in your conda environment that you
use, or in Ubuntu. I like Jason's suggestion to have a big fat warning
at the top.

Perhaps it can be removed from http://docs.sympy.org, but moved
somewhere else, but still make it available?

Ondrej

[Nathan Goldbaum]

I've just opened a pull request implementing my suggestion to use a rel="canonical" tag in the sympy docs build. I believe this should obviate the need to stop serving old documentation.

https://github.com/sympy/sympy/pull/12817

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