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

[Tim Cross <theophilusx@gmail.com>]

Ihor Radchenko <yantar92@gmail.com> writes:

> Rudolf Adamkovič <salutis@me.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.
>>
>> I know that Org does not compete for popularity, but for the people
>> getting familiar with it, this issue might cause a lot of headaches for
>> no good reason.
>
> Thanks for the heads up!
> I am CCing Tim Cross. He is currently doing some work on our server. He
> is more likely to know how to fix this.
>

Well I'm not sure what is the correct 'fix'. As far as I am aware, the
file part of URI are case sensitive and always have been. The web server
does not have a simple configuration switch to turn on case insensitive
URLs. If we want the web server to treat them as case insensitive, then
we have to add costly regular expression rewrite rules to the URLs sent to the
server. We would also need to verify this won't break anything - it is
possible some links depend on the server treating URLs as case
sensitive. 

It isn't clear to me what the chain of events have been here. Is it that
we changed the case on our server or is it simply people have put out
link which arfe wrong?

Is this the result of some change in the way the HTML manual is
generated or a change in how org generates HTML or is this just the
result of people posting the wrong URL?

BTW this is not something I have the access to change as it would
involve changes to the actual web server configuration. It isn't
something which can be 'fixed' at the Org level.