Re: [BUG] The documentation webserver gives 404s [9.5.4 (release_9.5.4-3-g6dc785 @ <censored>)]

[Ihor Radchenko]

Tim Cross <theophilusx@gmail.com> writes:

>>> I noticed that the Org documentation server gives 404 Not Found for a
>>> large number of links published all over the internet because (1) it
>>> parses URLs case-sensitively and (2) the case has changed at some point.
>>> I stumble upon such 404s errors daily.  See, for instance, the link to
>>> Column Groups documentation in this Stack Overflow answer:
>>>
>>> https://stackoverflow.com/a/8570307/1306956.
>> ...
>> Thanks for the heads up!
>> I am CCing Tim Cross. He is currently doing some work on our server. He
>> is more likely to know how to fix this.
>
> Well I'm not sure what is the correct 'fix'. As far as I am aware, the
> file part of URI are case sensitive and always have been. The web server
> does not have a simple configuration switch to turn on case insensitive
> URLs. If we want the web server to treat them as case insensitive, then
> we have to add costly regular expression rewrite rules to the URLs sent to the
> server. We would also need to verify this won't break anything - it is
> possible some links depend on the server treating URLs as case
> sensitive. 

> ...
> BTW this is not something I have the access to change as it would
> involve changes to the actual web server configuration. It isn't
> something which can be 'fixed' at the Org level. 

Then, I am also CCing Bastien.
As an idea, the "fix" can be creating symlinks to alternative file
names. But we first need to figure out the difference between old/new
naming schemes.

> It isn't clear to me what the chain of events have been here. Is it that
> we changed the case on our server or is it simply people have put out
> link which arfe wrong?
>
> Is this the result of some change in the way the HTML manual is
> generated or a change in how org generates HTML or is this just the
> result of people posting the wrong URL?

I have a suspicion that it might have something to do with texinfo
versions. AFAIU, Org manual pages are generated using makeinfo and it is
makeinfo that it responsible for the file name generation. (see
https://www.gnu.org/software/texinfo/manual/texinfo/texinfo.html#HTML-Splitting)
Probably, the naming scheme or some configuration variables have changed
in different versions of texinfo.

Best,
Ihor