Documentation links from google are broken

Hello, today I intended to link someone to the documentation for the fundamental.
https://nixos.org/manual/nix/unstable/language/builtins

This page forwards to nix.dev; whereby no search for ‘fold’ will yield the documentation in question.

I recognize to many functional style programmers these are intrinsic enough to not even require explaining; However most programmers are imperative in background, and these concepts just don’t exist.

I feel this is very important.

I ran into some broken links earlier, too. I was trying to find a reference for valid flake URLs, so I did a search for “nix flake urls”, which led me to https://nixos.org/manual/nix/stable/command-ref/new-cli/nix3-flake, which redirects to nix.dev and is a dead link.

The second link was to Flakes - NixOS Wiki, but the link for the “URL-like syntax” is the same dead link as above.

If you search “flakes” in the nix.dev website, it brings you here, which finally links to nix flake - Nix Reference Manual. I actually didn’t notice that the link on this page wasn’t broken until I went to retrace my steps, so at least I should be able to unbreak the link on the wiki.

Needless to say, fixing outdated links and add more redirects to make old URLs continue to navigate to useful pages would be great. Not really sure what effort has been done to this end so far, I’m sure it has been discussed and some work has been done. At least for the wiki, I’m sure it’d be possible to just incrementally work through the outdated links and update or fix them.

1 Like

@DarthPJB Yes, this is important, I’m really sorry for the inconvenience.

On the weekend @roberth and me attempted to finally switch over the mutable Nix manual URLs from nixos.org (which pointed to the latest development build as unstable and the latest release as stable, currently 2.22 - while most people run whatever Nixpkgs ships, which is currently 2.18) to nix.dev where we serve versioned URLs. Apparently I made some stupid mistake and already merged the fix, but the latest deployment fails for weird reasons outside my control. We have to wait for @garbas or @zimbatm or whoever has access to the infra to look into it.

@jchw My goal is to have all documentation URLs backwards compatible indefinitely, so this hopefully stays a temporary outage. In the meantime, you can remove the excess URL component manually (either the version, or stable or unstable) as a workaround.

Thanks for reporting the breakage, everyone. It shows that people care!

12 Likes

It’s great to know you already caught it!

Give robert my regards, and if I can assist, please let me know :slight_smile:

Seems to be fixed now. Thanks @garbas!

1 Like