news.xml: fix links as far as possible #552

Profpatsch · 2020-09-21T10:33:47Z

In order to honor the history of Nix(OS), this is an effort to restore
the announcement page to former glory. It is really quite fascinating,
how basically every link before 2010 is broken by now.

Some links are unfortunately beyond rescue, including University Delft
websites that were never archived and now point to a Github 404 …

Things left to do:

Change all pdfs to archive links. Eelco’s papers still work, but
they shouldn’t change and the links will break eventually. Better
safe than sorry.
Fix the release pages. From around 2010, a grave sin was commited
and most links point directly to build outputs of hydra.nixos.org,
which are obviously all broken by now. I found that most should be
easy to recover by pointing them to releases.nixos.org. Others
might be lost.
Think about how to link to historical release documents that use
relative links right now. The sections might be restructured in the
future, breaking the anchors.
Archive videos of talks we point to. At least one is on Youtube.

Most external historical links should be back to “working”, for
various definitions of working.

In order to honor the history of Nix(OS), this is an effort to restore the announcement page to former glory. It is really quite fascinating, how basically every link before 2010 is broken by now. Some links are unfortunately beyond rescue, including University Delft websites that were never archived and now point to a Github 404 … Things left to do: - Change all pdfs to archive links. Eelco’s papers still work, but they shouldn’t change and the links will break eventually. Better safe than sorry. - Fix the release pages. From around 2010, a grave sin was commited and most links point directly to build outputs of hydra.nixos.org, which are obviously all broken by now. I found that most should be easy to recover by pointing them to `releases.nixos.org`. Others might be lost. - Think about how to link to historical release documents that use relative links right now. The sections might be restructured in the future, breaking the anchors. - Archive videos of talks we point to. At least one is on Youtube. Most external historical links should be back to “working”, for various definitions of working.

davidak

many links don't need to get changed because they still work

davidak · 2020-09-21T11:06:52Z

news.xml

@@ -291,7 +291,7 @@
      We're happy to announce that <strong>NixCon 2017</strong>, the
      second Nix Conference, will take place <strong>October 28–31 2017 in Munich</strong>
      For more information, see the
-      <a href="http://nixcon2017.org/">NixCon 2017 website</a>.


http://nixcon2017.org/ still works for me

static site that won’t change

davidak · 2020-09-21T11:07:36Z

news.xml

      We're happy to announce that <strong>NixCon 2015</strong>, the
      first Nix Conference, will take place on <strong>November
        14—15th 2015 in Berlin</strong>. For more information, see the
-      <a href="http://conf.nixos.org">NixCon website</a>. And please


http://conf.nixos.org/ still works

static site that won’t change

davidak · 2020-09-21T11:08:02Z

news.xml

@@ -404,12 +404,12 @@
      NixCon 2015
    </title>
    <description>
-      <a href="http://conf.nixos.org"><img class="inline" style="width: 10em;"


http://conf.nixos.org/ still works

static site that won’t change

davidak · 2020-09-21T11:09:05Z

news.xml

@@ -556,10 +556,10 @@ $ nix-store -qR /run/current-system | grep openssl
    </title>
    <description>
      <a href="https://www.domenkozar.com/">Domen Kožar</a> gave <a
-        href="https://fosdem.org/2014/schedule/event/nixos_declarative_configuration_linux_distribution/">a


use official archive https://archive.fosdem.org/2014/schedule/event/nixos_declarative_configuration_linux_distribution/

static site that won’t change

davidak · 2020-09-21T11:09:26Z

news.xml

        talk at FOSDEM about NixOS</a> (<a
        href="https://video.fosdem.org/2014/H1309_Van_Rijn/Saturday/NixOS_declarative_configuration_Linux_distribution.webm">video</a>).
-      Also, Ludovic Courtès gave <a href="https://fosdem.org/2014/schedule/event/gnuguix/">a talk on


https://archive.fosdem.org/2014/schedule/event/gnuguix/

static site that won’t change

davidak · 2020-09-21T11:10:19Z

news.xml

@@ -590,7 +590,7 @@ $ nix-store -qR /run/current-system | grep openssl
      potentially destabilising changes that sometimes occur on the
      unstable branch. You can get NixOS 13.10 ISOs and VirtualBox
      appliances from the <a href="/download.html">download
-        page</a>. See the <a href="https://nixos.org/nix-dev/2013-October/011941.html">announcement</a>


it redirects to https://releases.nixos.org/nix-dev/2013-October/011941.html

not sure if that is a stable url

davidak · 2020-09-21T11:11:10Z

news.xml

@@ -607,7 +607,7 @@ $ nix-store -qR /run/current-system | grep openssl
      <a href="https://hydra.nixos.org/release/nix/nix-1.6.1">Nix
        1.6.1</a> has been released. This is primarily a bug fix
      release but has some minor new features. See the <a
-        href="https://nixos.org/manual/nix/stable/#ssec-relnotes-1.6.1">release


the link still works

why have you replaced it?

davidak · 2020-09-21T11:11:58Z

news.xml

@@ -674,7 +674,7 @@ $ nix-store -qR /run/current-system | grep openssl
    </title>
    <description>
      A sprint focused on NixOS and <a href="http://kotti.pylonsproject.org/">Kotti</a> will be held <a
-        href="http://www.coactivate.org/projects/zidanca-sprint-2013/project-home">22-26


the link still works

static site that won’t change in the future.

Profpatsch · 2020-09-21T11:32:49Z

many links don't need to get changed because they still work

I applied some reason to which links to archive. In general, pages that are static websites which won’t change in the future (e.g. the nixcon 2017 site) we can archive right now, since the only change to it in the future will be the link breaking.

davidak · 2020-09-21T11:51:08Z

i'm not sure if that makes sense. i wouldn't do that on my personal page

i don't think the fosdem page will break and we should make sure the nixcon pages also don't break for historic reasons. i would like to have them on one domain to make it more consistent #397

Profpatsch · 2020-09-21T11:58:40Z

i don't think the fosdem page will break and we should make sure the nixcon pages also don't break for historic reasons. i would like to have them on one domain to make it more consistent #397

Once we get them all to stable subdomains, we can switch the links back, yes.

Profpatsch · 2020-09-21T12:00:10Z

The news page is really a snapshot of the state at the point of writing the news, so I’d argue to snapshot the pages at the state they were in when a news item is released. The links are going to rot, the pages are going to change (or even change into advertising for sunglasses, as happened with one of the ACM Sigplan domains …).

davidak · 2020-09-21T13:39:31Z

that makes sense

garbas · 2020-09-23T06:43:05Z

Here is a mix of my thoughts on the news section in general:

I personally find it completely OK if news from 10 years ago has broken links. I use Wayback Machine add-on which fixed this for me most of the time.
News section was taken from the landing page because existing users are not primary audience of the landing page. But there is a section on the landing page were we can show one important announcement, like we already have for NixCon or like we will have when new Nix/NixOS version is released. So in reality is not really gone from the landing page just reduced to one item.
There is a plan that each release version would get a dedicated page, linking to only, well mostly, to release.nixos.org, which is our immutable storage - out archive.org.
It is important to define the purpose of the news section of the site. I would refer here to the audience and fuel the purpose from there. Main audience of the website are new nix users and they "story" could be something like this:
1. Just heard of Nix, went to nixos.org and got excited because of the examples and benefits it brings - Landing and Features page
2. Downloaded it for my system / cloud (Download page)
3. Need to learn more about Nix, I hope there are some tutorials about Nix for X language - Learn page
4. Everything is working except one little thing is missing how do I contribute back, oh is just a PR? nice and simple - Community page -> pointing to How to contribute tutorial
5. I'm sold on Nix I want to get involved into the community and help as much as I can (News/Blog)
As you can see each of above points happen in some sort of order and each of above points correlates to some page. You can also see that we try this order of pages in the navigation bar (Community, Governance, Donate pages are going to be merged soon, once we have other pages to take their place).

The purpose of the news/blog section is then to show the "internals" of the community, trying to answer things such are "What are others working on?", "What is happening in marketing team?", "What is coming next in Nix?", "Which RFCs are being reviewed/discussed?", ...

This works is being tracked under #446

Regardless of my comments I think this PR improves on the current state, until we actually implement #446 (expecting this to happen this year).

garbas

👍

davidak suggested changes Sep 21, 2020

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garbas approved these changes Sep 23, 2020

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garbas merged commit c1e087f into NixOS:master Sep 23, 2020

Profpatsch mentioned this pull request Sep 23, 2020

Blog / News section #446

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news.xml: fix links as far as possible #552

news.xml: fix links as far as possible #552

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news.xml: fix links as far as possible #552

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Profpatsch commented Sep 21, 2020

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