www.gnucash.org/pub/gnucash

[Geert Janssens]

On Wednesday 19 February 2014 07:08:45 John Ralls wrote:
> On Feb 19, 2014, at 6:51 AM, Derek Atkins <warlord at MIT.EDU> wrote:
> > John Ralls <jralls at ceridwen.us> writes:
> >>> I think keeping around history is a good thing.
> >>> Disk is cheap.
> >>> Just mark it an archive and add a README to the current
> >>> location(s)
> >> 
> >> As I said, the history is preserved in git.
> > 
> > It's not quite the same as "release tarballs".
> 
> Right. It's better. Much better, since it has the development context.
> A tarball is just a snapshot.
> >> With the old collections on www.gnucash.org and ftp.gnome.org (and
> >> its mirrors) we run the risk of someone finding the collection and
> >> thinking that we’re dead, that GnuCash isn’t releasing any more.
> >> If you *really* want to serve those old tarballs, at least
> >> consolidate them on SF and adjust the links in the old news
> >> articles.
> > 
> > Adding a prominent README file, or changing the directory name to
> > "archive", or even adding a file named This.In.An.Old.Archive would
> > also inform someone that it's an archive and provide a pointer for
> > where to find the actual current sources.
> > 
> > People aren't THAT dumb.  Or at least I'd like to think that. ;)
> 
> You could do that with www.gnucash.org, but master.gnome.org (the
> developer side of ftp.gnome.org) is highly automated and protected. I
> don't know that I can insert non-release files. Besides, it's rather
> hard to argue that gnucash belongs there in any form, since we're not
> part of Gnome.
> 
> But why? If you insist on having all of the releases available,
> shouldn't they all be available from the same place so that they're
> easy to find?
> 
I'm not a strong proponent of keeping the old locations alive but to 
your question of why I could add this:

I had a discussion on a similar topic with Linas last year when I was 
cleaning up the directory structure on the gnucash website. His argument 
to keep things as they are was "don't break the internet".

There are several external sites referring to (obsolete) gnucash pages. 
These vary from abandoned user pages on sites like geocities or yahoo to 
old catalogs,...

By removing the old locations you  break these pages. You could argue if 
that's our problem but in a way it is. Even though these are linking to 
outdated material they do point users direction gnucash. If the link is 
broken on the other hand you already spread the suggestion that gnucash 
is dead *before* they reach content we manage effectively preventing 
such potential users from finding us in the first place.

Yet having all said that I do agree that it doesn't make much sense to 
have these sites referring to obsolete material. So I would prefer to

- remove the old content where we can, possibly moving the old tarballs 
to sourceforge
- install a permanent redirect to the actual gnucash front page if 
anyone tries to load one of the old links.

We can do this for www.gnucash.org/pub. For ftp.gnome.org I don't know.

How about that ?

Geert