Paul,

I think you are the right person for this, but I could be wrong…

On JBoss Developer we index quickstarts for each product and render some of the documentation (README.md, CONTRIBUTING.md, for example) on the site. Here’s an example:http://www.jboss.org/quickstarts/eap/contributing/. We index the latest release of each quickstart from the related Quickstart repo in the JBoss Developer GitHub organisation. It’s important that we index the release, as we know it has been QA’d against the latest product GA on the site.

However, there are several cases where broken links exist in the documentation that we are indexing. Notice the ‘Fork’ link on http://www.jboss.org/quickstarts/eap/contributing/. This is due to a broken link in the source content: https://github.com/jboss-developer/jboss-eap-quickstarts/blob/6.3.0.GA/CONTRIBUTING.md. This is easy to fix at source, but we would need to wait for the next quickstarts release (in this case EAP 6.4.0.GA) before JBoss Developer can consume the fix. Broken links are bad for user experience and adversely affect SEO, so we’d rather get them fixed sooner. 

One solution would be to allow documentation only changes to be made to quickstarts between releases. In the example above, we would create a commit (fixing the broken link) on top of the 6.3.0.GA release (https://github.com/jboss-developer/jboss-eap-quickstarts/releases/tag/6.3.0.GA) and then tag it as a new release. I think we’d have to use some naming convention to indicate it was just docs that changed. JBoss Developer would then index the new tag in order to consume the fix. 

Is this the right thing to do?

Paul.

-- 
Paul Robinson
JBoss Developer Team Lead (www.jboss.org)

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