deprecating content

[Paul W. Frields]

On Fri, 2007-03-09 at 14:02 -0800, Karsten Wade wrote:
> As we move content from fedora.redhat.com/docs to
> docs.fedoraproject.org, it would be good to deal with some deprecated
> content.  In particular, we have content that is only appropriate for
> previous version of Fedora, such as the stateless Linux materials.
> 
> Even when something is outdated and therefore currently inaccurate, I
> still feel as if we need to mark it as archived v. delete it entirely.
> The latter happened recently with the "Stateless Linux Tutorial".  I
> think a better solution is to put up an interstitial page that describes
> it as deprecated and links to it, then we can let that stay in time.
> 
> Any thoughts on approaches here?  What should stay forever?  Is there
> anything that should be deleted from the Internet forever?

In thinking about this, we shouldn't forget that our own CVS allows even
"dead" documents to be resurrected by curious users.  Yes, it requires
some skill and knowledge, but this particular barrier is one with which
we shouldn't be too concerned.

I'm thinking of the analogous situation of the DocBook Definitive Guide,
where it's quite difficult to track down versions from the authoritative
web site for a particular revision of DocBook (say, V4.4), since other
versions have taken precedence.  The original book source is easily
available in CVS and with a little know-how and elbow grease, one can
build the book at a particular snapshot in time.  But the authors and
publisher have made the decision to wipe out the "published" snapshot to
encourage users to adopt the newer (and presumably improved) versions.

This is much the same attitude we encourage with Fedora -- it's why we
don't support back past a couple releases.  If you need longer term
stability, you should be using one of our commercial-quality downstream
distros like RHEL or CentOS.  I fear that continually providing
documentation for unsupported versions sends a subtle message that
either (1) we are supporting use of outdated releases, or (2) we are
maintaining outdated docs.

A doc should live and breathe with the rest of the distro.  If it can't
keep up, if it doesn't have authors and editors who want to maintain and
update it, we should whisk it away and put in a "permanently moved" that
sends users to an explanation of this stuff, and possibly directions on
how to get the stuff from CVS.  We would purposely be setting a slightly
higher barrier (albeit giving readers the tools to overcome it) to
ensure that many would simply say, "Aw, the heck with it, I might as
well get the newer stuff where I can read/google/write up-to-date docs."

I'm curious as to how many visits we actually *get* for outdated docs,
which would be a good litmus test for whether we really need to maintain
them.

-- 
Paul W. Frields, RHCE                          http://paul.frields.org/
  gpg fingerprint: 3DA6 A0AC 6D58 FEC4 0233  5906 ACDB C937 BD11 3717
      Fedora Project:  http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/PaulWFrields
  irc.freenode.net: stickster @ #fedora-docs, #fedora-devel, #fredlug
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