Removing the deprecated htmldocs for good?

Removing the deprecated htmldocs for good?

[Lukas Bulwahn]

Hi Jonathan, hi Konstantin,

While scanning through the internet for kernel documentation, I
stumbled upon the old deprecated htmldocs under
https://www.kernel.org/doc/htmldocs/. I see that on
https://www.kernel.org/doc/, we already point out that 'htmldocs -
Kernel Documentation in docbook format (deprecated).' is deprecated.
If I am not mistaken, all the content from htmldocs has now been
transformed into .rst and has potentially evolved further and hence
all relevant information should also already be available somewhere in
https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/.

Is it now time to delete the content under
https://www.kernel.org/doc/htmldocs/ for good?

I doubt that htmldocs serves any good purpose as of now and I fear
that newcomers might refer to that deprecated kernel documentation
from v4.12, just because it is available and can be found with Google
before one might find its copy in
https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/. Some kernel newcomer actually
already proved that point to me by example...


Best regards,

Lukas

Re: Removing the deprecated htmldocs for good?

[Jonathan Corbet]

Lukas Bulwahn <lukas.bulwahn@gmail.com> writes:

> Hi Jonathan, hi Konstantin,
>
> While scanning through the internet for kernel documentation, I
> stumbled upon the old deprecated htmldocs under
> https://www.kernel.org/doc/htmldocs/. I see that on
> https://www.kernel.org/doc/, we already point out that 'htmldocs -
> Kernel Documentation in docbook format (deprecated).' is deprecated.
> If I am not mistaken, all the content from htmldocs has now been
> transformed into .rst and has potentially evolved further and hence
> all relevant information should also already be available somewhere in
> https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/.
>
> Is it now time to delete the content under
> https://www.kernel.org/doc/htmldocs/ for good?

I think that time may have come, yes; perhaps just have it redirect to
https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/ instead?

Thanks,

jon

Re: Removing the deprecated htmldocs for good?

[Konstantin Ryabitsev]

On Thu, Dec 30, 2021 at 09:19:21AM -0700, Jonathan Corbet wrote:
> > While scanning through the internet for kernel documentation, I
> > stumbled upon the old deprecated htmldocs under
> > https://www.kernel.org/doc/htmldocs/. I see that on
> > https://www.kernel.org/doc/, we already point out that 'htmldocs -
> > Kernel Documentation in docbook format (deprecated).' is deprecated.
> > If I am not mistaken, all the content from htmldocs has now been
> > transformed into .rst and has potentially evolved further and hence
> > all relevant information should also already be available somewhere in
> > https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/.
> >
> > Is it now time to delete the content under
> > https://www.kernel.org/doc/htmldocs/ for good?
> 
> I think that time may have come, yes; perhaps just have it redirect to
> https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/ instead?

I'm going through my backlog (of which I have lots) and I finally got around
to making this change. Requesting https://www.kernel.org/doc/htmldocs/ should
now send you to the archives site, and it's gone from the listing in
www.kernel.org/doc.

-K