SVN bad behaviour makes what is written in the book wrong.

C. Michael Pilato cmpilato at red-bean.com
Fri Mar 29 12:59:44 CDT 2013


[Removing our guest from the distribution list.]

On 03/29/2013 12:33 PM, Daniel Shahaf wrote:
> As a first-order approximation, old versions of the book could use the
> one-giant-HTML-page version of the 1.7/1.8 book as their <link
> rel='canonical'>.

Correct.  That's a[n| relatively] easy fix.

> I'm not sure what's the extent of the moving-around of content is.
> Would "Manually set a custom XML tag on every <section2/> in every old
> version of the book" be a feasible and semiautomable (i.e.,
> automable for those <section2/>s that did _not_ move around, and manual
> for the rest) process? [1]  The build process would then be patched to
> render those tags as <link rel='canonical'/>.

The word "manual" is disallowed in this conversation.  :-)  Also, I'd prefer
that the DocBook sources be, you know, valid DocBook as much as possible. 
Further, the problem won't be with <sect2>'s that have moved so much as for
<sect3>'s -- the <link> tag is scoped to cover the entire page, and we can't
really say on a <sect3>-by-<sect3> -- or, in the extreme case --
<para>-by-<para> basis where the updated content might live.  And it makes
sense that we'd have this limitation, as the <link rel="canonical"> tag was
designed to help search engines canonicalize their links to the /exact same
content/ reachable by different URLs.  Our use of it for the purposes of
trying to point folks intentionally to /different/ content is not in keeping
with that design.

It might be more sensible to add header/footer matter to all the old book
version which says, "Hey, please note that you're reading a really old
version of this content, which is fine if you're still running the matching
really old version of Subversion.  Otherwise, we strongly suggest that you
visit http://svnbook.red-bean.com/ and peruse the appropriate version of
this book."
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