Re: [BUG] The documentation webserver gives 404s [9.5.4 (release_9.5.4-3-g6dc785 @ <censored>)]

[Tim Cross <theophilusx@gmail.com>]

Max Nikulin <manikulin@gmail.com> writes:

>> 
>>>>> I noticed that the Org documentation server gives 404 Not Found for a
>>>>> large number of links published all over the internet because (1) it
>>>>> parses URLs case-sensitively and (2) the case has changed at some point.
>>>>> I stumble upon such 404s errors daily.  See, for instance, the link to
>>>>> Column Groups documentation in this Stack Overflow answer:
>>>>>
>>>>> https://stackoverflow.com/a/8570307/1306956.
>
> On 03/07/2022 21:01, Ihor Radchenko wrote:
>> Then, I am also CCing Bastien.
>> As an idea, the "fix" can be creating symlinks to alternative file
>> names. But we first need to figure out the difference between old/new
>> naming schemes.
>
> Previous discussion of the issue:
>
> Ori. Re: Possible bug report: URL capitalization in online manual. Sun, 9 Feb 2020
> 13:49:04 -0500
> https://list.orgmode.org/CACyCJqX3xrJsctFEmTNUp6HwzGE1M83KGnc9atYt_LUpgk69Bw@mail.gmail.com/


Thanks Max, that helped fill in some of the blanks and confirms some of
what I assumed.

Seems that the change to letter case was a deliberate change, as was
removal of the old pages without upper case letters following the
initial uppercase letter in the filename.

Making the server case insensitive is not straight-forward. Essentially,
we would need to add a regular expression based rewrite rule OR we would
need to add copies or perhaps setup symbolic links. While all possible,
it will add to maintenance overhead and will likely be a source for
future bugs.

I do have an alternative suggestion which may help. Given that the
'broken' URLs are actually from external links to old documentation
which has been removed, what we could do is create a more informative
404 page. Once users are on the 'real' site, the case issue does not
exist. It is only a problem due to outdated URLs on external sites like
stack overflow. Instead of just saying 404 Not Found, the page could say
the requested URL was not found and is likely a link to old outdated doc
documentation. The page could include a link to the main orgmode
page. This would be a fairly simple 'fix' that would improve user
experience to some degree.