Re: Documentation: 21.5. Default Roles - Mailing list pgsql-docs

On 2/3/20 3:42 PM, Bruce Momjian wrote:
> On Thu, Jan 23, 2020 at 07:12:08PM -0500, R Ransbottom wrote:
>> On Mon, Jan 20, 2020 at 12:23:48PM +0900, Ian Barwick wrote:
>>> On 2020/01/19 12:56, R Ransbottom wrote:
>>
>>>> I would hope to find correct documentation somewhere--that somewhere
>>
>>> Indeed, however it's important that the PostgreSQL documentation remains
>>> stable for released versions.
>>
>>> As-is, the current patch set would result in the term "default role(s)"
>>> disappearing from the documentation in the next minor release, which is
>>> bound to cause confusion for anyone searching the documentation for the
>>> term they're familiar with (unless they happen to be reading this thread
>>> or following the git commit log). Cue cries of "OMG Postgres removed a
>>> feature in a minor release!!!?!!".
>>
>>> And as Stephen mentions, it will break a lot of secondary documentation -
>>> not just blogs but things like internal training  materials etc.
>>
>>> If this change is made (which I'm personally not against), then it should be
>>> only from PostgreSQL 13. For 9.6 ~ 12, IMHO it would be better to tweak the
>>> existing documentation to somehow mention that "default roles" should be
>>> thought of as "prefined roles", and note they will be called this from Pg13.
>>
>> Ian, agreed modulo 13.
>>
>> The current section(s) could forward readers to a revised section.  The
>> DEFAULT_ROLE_* stuff could carry two names to allow a comprehensive fix
>> in 12.X.  That could allow the deprecation and misinformation to end one
>> EoL sooner.
>
> With minor releases coming next week, and no movement on doing web
> redirects, and no clarity on what this is missing even in master, I will
> revert this patch in all branches soon.  I think everyone agrees the new
> documentation title is better, but we don't want to break things or add
> inconsistency to do it.

Sorry, I missed the original comment on the "web redirects"

So, if there was something done to redirect people from specific
deprecated documentation pages historically, it was before my time. Most
of the redirects have been as general purposes ones (e.g. /docs/12), the
rules we put in for getting rid of "static", and the release notes,
which still receives some negative feedback towards it for different
reasons (though I think overall the effort was well-received). Anyway,
if we had a redirect in place, I'd want us to do it well.


I don't know if it's possible...but if we were able to make a change in
the doc source to say "this page is now this page" either as a
standalone page, or generated a HTML page that automatically redirects,
that may solve the issue. Or if we can have a "ghost page" available
with the old link, perhaps we can put something into pgweb to
automatically redirect to the new page. Other than that, the only quick
solution I see is to hardcode it, which I'm not a fan of.

So from a pgweb standpoint, the safe thing would be to do nothing with
the URL. If you could keep the URL but change the page title, perhaps
that would suffice?

Jonathan