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   Joe Brockmeier (@jzb) (jzb@mastodon.social)'s status on Thursday, 05-Dec-2024 00:23:16 JST Joe Brockmeier (@jzb)

   Anybody know what happened to the #Debian News archives on the web site? It looks like years of Debian Weekly News issues have disappeared and now return 404s. That's a bummer.

   I was a contributor to DWN for a short time from 2001 to I forget when. I'd have expected Debian to keep those up pretty much forever.

   • Embed this notice
     Stefano Zacchiroli (zacchiro@mastodon.xyz)'s status on Thursday, 05-Dec-2024 00:23:15 JST Stefano Zacchiroli

     in reply to

     @jzb looks like a bunch of old news pages were deleted in commits like this one https://salsa.debian.org/webmaster-team/webwml/-/commit/be8c189a8accd9bd381148c1a1a815c937e9fe2b , but I've no idea why.

   • Embed this notice
     Joe Brockmeier (@jzb) (jzb@mastodon.social)'s status on Thursday, 05-Dec-2024 01:58:29 JST Joe Brockmeier (@jzb)

     in reply to

     • Stefano Zacchiroli
     • Jochem Kossen (Observeur)

     @zacchiro @jkossen Ah, thanks. I have left a comment there. I wonder what the rationale for that was -- it's disappointing to see so much Debian history just swept away. It's still on archive.org (bless 'em) but it makes it that much harder for people to search for and find info about what happened in Debian years ago.

   • Embed this notice
     Stefano Zacchiroli (zacchiro@mastodon.xyz)'s status on Thursday, 05-Dec-2024 01:58:29 JST Stefano Zacchiroli

     in reply to

     @jzb Yeah. I have a hard time believing this was intentional, as preserving its own archives is quite rooted in Debian culture. So either it was a mistake, or there's a (technical?) reason I'm not getting. (I don't know who to ping on Mastodon who could be a good contact for this. If other Debian followers of mine know, please shout 🙂 ) Archive-ly yours.

   • Embed this notice
     Joe Brockmeier (@jzb) (jzb@mastodon.social)'s status on Saturday, 07-Dec-2024 01:45:46 JST Joe Brockmeier (@jzb)

     in reply to

     • Stefano Zacchiroli

     @zacchiro Apparently it was intentional: "The old issues of DWN are still available in their original location on the Debian mailing lists.
     www.debian.org/News contains two links to the mailing list archive.
     But on the web page, we want to show only the relevant news to our users, which are the recent ones from the last years, but not the very old ones."

     https://salsa.debian.org/webmaster-team/webwml/-/commit/e92471ba4917f0ec62d22e04229928e5531698f4#note_556263

     Can't say I agree with that thinking. This is how you get link rot.

   • Embed this notice
     Stefano Zacchiroli (zacchiro@mastodon.xyz)'s status on Saturday, 07-Dec-2024 01:45:46 JST Stefano Zacchiroli

     in reply to

     @jzb that's so weird, I guess they consider email the primary media here, and web just a (temporary) cache. But it's an explanation at least!