The PDF version of the serverguide has not updated. It has been well over 24 hours since I made and edit. I want to determine is the file name for the PDF will change, because it is odd and looks machine generated. Currently it is linked from the help.ubunutu.com base page where 20.04 preliminary has been added (but for some reason it didn’t publish last night, maybe tonight), but we won’t be able to do that if it changes.
I’ll add redirects to help.ubuntu.com for lts and stable serverguides to the new spots tomorrow, which should publish sometime Thursday.
EDIT: O.K. I’ll make the PDF link at help.ubuntu.com file name independent by using the same address as herein, instead of what it ends up as (duh).
Deleted the “Service - Introduction” topic as it was a filler page, “DNS TBD” was on there but that has an extra page now anyway. I also removed the link from the introduction to not fail on the removed page.
Some more cleanup of no more supported items around IRC and Mailman. Removed the pages and dropped the links from here. For Mailman I re-added links to the upstream setup guide with exim4/postfix on these pages.
Next I’ll re-order the index to keep introdcutions before the content. It doesn’t make sense otherwise and especially in the single-PDF that is generated it is awkward to read it in any other order.
Fixed another missing url entry in the mapping table.
This time I looked at the source code of a page (not that the actual page used matters) and searched for discourse, only finding the one expected reference. I also looked at the code manually.
Hi Jrmyck, thanks for pointing out the broken links! They should be fixed now. This table of links on the Intro page is new, and still a bit work in process. I’d appreciate if you’d doublecheck and notice if any are still incorrect, or if there are any other necessary improvements for the front table links.
I removed the links to the 16.04 documentation, as it was deleted from help.ubuntu.com when it became EOL (End Of Life) earlier this year. I forgot about these links at the time.
I keep some old copies of help.ubuntu.com, as it was on some dates, on my web site. I also use it to preview pending updates to be sure we didn’t make a mistake. @food4doug, you could get 16.04 docs there. I encode the link below to prevent the barrage of bots that come whenever I post a link:
double u double u double u dot smythies dot com /~doug/linux/ubuntu-docs/help.ubuntu.com/
The PDF still has not updated. It also doesn’t seem to include screen shots.
Now that we want to start preliminary publications of 22.04 LTS documentation, it is time to create the required infrastructure in this disclosure version of the serverguide to continue to support 20.04 while also publishing 22.04, and in 2 years 24.04.
Hi Doug,
indeed it is time to adapt that - but the adaptation - for now - will be minimal.
In the most recent discussion we have considered that the main content will always be meant to apply to the latest version. Older versions are still meant to be covered and where differing they should be marked accordingly.
The reality is that maintaining them separately just is an entry to redundancy and all the issues that come with it. And on the other hand the majority of entries does not change often. For those that do it would be something like “Note: in releases before XX.YY …”.
Example:
Former: “To achieve foo, do bar”
New: “To achieve foo, do foobar … Note: in releases before XX.YY …”
That allows to document for example a feature that is added in between LTSes already when it is added. We’d just state that it was not available before XX.YY. And it allows - if it changed how to do things - to outline both versions. The scale of this depends on a case by case decision. For example if on a page 95% stays the same but one aspect is different, then a little Note before a section will do. If on the other hand e.g. handling a particular workload was totally changed (e.g. we changed which program is in main to handle it) then that would more likely be an intro page linking to older/newer content.
If down the road we really have a proliferation of content due to “too many versions” we can think about splitting it, but right now that should result in the best outcome for a rather low effort.
The page already says “Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (Focal Fossa) and later” to reflect that. I’ve found that we also need to change the PDF link to say the same and I should mark the “and later” just as bold as the rest.
You are absolutely right Doug, last update was at “Generated on 2021-03-03 03:52:43”.
I have to admit I do not know enough about the underlying details … :-/
I’ll get in contact with the web team who owns the machinery that converts one to the other to see what is the problem.
@dsmythies - FYI I have not forgotten this, but the PDF generation is more deeply lost than anyone expected and therefore takes more time than expected to recover, but I’m on it.
Hi,
after PDF generation being broken for quite a while I have worked with our web team and it is now back on track - with better format and link retention than before - and finally rendered daily again.
This time the server team itself is aware where and how this is done, so I hope it won’t be lost “again” so easily.