Re: [Firebird-website] Firebird 3.0 alpha release notes

[Mark R. <ma...@la...>]

On Wed, 15 Jan 2014 09:43:39 +1300, Helen Borrie <he...@ii...>
wrote:
> At 08:15 a.m. 15/01/2014, Mark Rotteveel wrote:
>>The Firebird 3.0 alpha 1 release notes aren't included on 
>>http://www.firebirdsql.org/en/release-notes/
>>
>>Currently I have to dig up the Firebird 3.0 Alpha 1 news item to refer 
>>to the release notes. I'd appreciate it if they could be included here.
> 
> We've never published alpha or beta release notes separately from the
> software kits and there are still the same good reasons not to.  The
notes
> that go with pre-release kits are "moving items":  there's no way, past
the
> release date of the kit, to tell what's correct or not correct for a
> subsequent pre-release or release.  And it goes without saying that
having
> details from pre-release notes being picked up by search engines is not
at
> all desirable.

Your argument about search engines is moot: the alpha release notes have
already been indexed by Google, eg see
https://www.google.com/search?q=firebird+%22Internal+Debug+Info+Made+Human-readable%22


There are several solutions that address your reservations, but that do
not make it hard to locate or link to those files. 

Some solutions include:
1) A generic URL per Firebird main version (eg 2.1, 2.5, 3.0) that
redirects(!) to the releasenotes of the latest available of that main
version (eg currently for 3.0 it would redirect to the 3.0 Alpha 1 release
notes)
2) Using a specific folder for posting the pre-release release notes, and
excluding that folder from search engines using robots.txt

Mark