Re: "current" URL/link for Octave docs

[Kai Torben Ohlhus]

On 7/8/20 4:55 PM, Andrew Janke wrote:
> On 7/7/20 10:14 PM, Kai Torben Ohlhus wrote:
>> This feature already exists.  The latest GNU Octave documentation has
>> always been available from
>>
>>    https://octave.org/doc/interpreter
>>
>> Now I am overhauling the website a little and added a more intuitive link
>>
>>    https://octave.org/doc/latest
>>
>> Thus "latest" and "interpreter" point to the latest version of the
>> documentation now. [...]
> 
> Cool! Thanks for adding the "latest" URL.
> 
> It looks like this is implemented as an HTTP redirect, not an alias.
> Would this work better as an alias? With a redirect, I think you get
> less googlejuice, and when users are viewing these pages in a browser
> and then copy the URL for sharing with other people or pasting in to
> Stack Overflow answers or whatever, they end up getting the
> version-specific URL, so the version-specific URLs are what end up
> getting propagated into the world of discussion on the web.
> 
> Cheers,
> Andrew
> 

I see.  So far I did not regard this as a problem, as certain URLs are
only valid for a certain Octave versions. For example, betacdf() moved
in version 4.4 from core Octave to the OF statistics package.

Thus posting the URL

   https://octave.org/doc/v4.2.0/XREFbetacdf.html

qualifies for a permalink, while

   https://octave.org/doc/latest/XREFbetacdf.html

is just another broken link on the web as soon as "4.2.0" is no longer
"latest".

Is there a better way to fix this?

Kai