Bug 16840

Summary: URLs for old releases are broken with every new release
Product: Project Infrastructure Reporter: Jason Sherman <jsn.sherman>
Component: Project websiteAssignee: Chris Cormack <chris>
Status: ASSIGNED --- QA Contact:
Severity: normal    
Priority: P5 - low CC: jonathan.druart, kyle, tomascohen, wizzyrea
Version: unspecified   
Hardware: All   
OS: All   
Change sponsored?: --- Patch complexity: ---
Documentation contact: Documentation submission:
Text to go in the release notes:
Version(s) released in:

Description Jason Sherman 2016-07-01 18:42:46 UTC
I'm working up a nice CentOS 7 ansible role that builds Koha from the tarball release. The way you shuffle tarball upon release makes automating koha builds more difficult than it has to be, and is user hostile.

When you move tarballs under old releases, you don't offer a redirect to the new location, instead you return a 404. When you publish content to the web, you should treat that URL as valid for as long as you have the associated content. In this case, you still have the content, and you know exactly where it is.  Ideally, you would offer clients a 301 redirect to the new location. You should only return a 404 when you deleted content or honestly have no idea what the client is asking for.

This is a general website stewardship issue, and it may not seem like the most critical thing when you are trying to get a release out the door, so I would be happy to contribute my expertise and/or time to improve this aspect of release management for Koha.

Thanks!
Comment 1 Jonathan Druart 2016-08-19 10:14:06 UTC
Hi Jason,
I am CCing Tomas and Kyle as I have no idea who deals with the tarballs.
Comment 2 Liz Rea 2019-02-07 15:18:15 UTC
I think Chris manages this part of the website, and the release tools likely do the shuffling.

The tech for this isn't very, and has never been, sophisticated. Thank you for introducing a new use case that is a reasonable reason to update the functionality.

Cheers,
Liz