"Main" vs versioned links / main broken

[jrfnl]

It appears the main branch of this repo has been removed.
This was the branch ReadTheDocs would previously default to and which would always point to the documentation of the latest release.

As a consequence of this, a lot of links to the PHPUnit documentation are in the form of https://docs.phpunit.de/en/main/[page].html and, as there doesn't appear to be any redirection in place, these links are now all broken and result in 404 pages.

Would it be an idea to either bring back the main branch ? Or to put rolling redirection in place for https://docs.phpunit.de/en/main/[page].html links to https://docs.phpunit.de/en/[#.#]/[page].html, where #.# would be updated whenever a new minor of PHPUnit is released ?

[sebastianbergmann]

It appears the main branch of this repo has been removed.

This is correct. This change was intentional and not a mistake.

This was the branch ReadTheDocs would previously default to and which would always point to the documentation of the latest release.

This is not correct: ReadTheDocs did build the main branch and made it available at https://docs.phpunit.de/en/main, but ReadTheDocs was manually configured to use the branch for the latest stable version of PHPUnit (at the moment 11.4 for example) as the default and therefore point to https://docs.phpunit.de/en/11.4 (for example) by default.

AFAIK, https://docs.phpunit.de/en/main was never "advertised" as an "official" artifact. Documentation for the next version must not be linked to (apart from pointing out mistakes in it, for example, of course). Permantently linking to https://docs.phpunit.de/en/main URLs does not make any sense to me as main will always be a moving target. The same holds true for latest, stable, etc.

TL;DR: https://docs.phpunit.de/en/main should have never existed and it no longer does. Links on the world wide web to this are not under my control. As far as I know, I cannot set up the redirects you ask for with ReadTheDocs.

[jrfnl]

Thanks for your response @sebastianbergmann. Understood.

I ran into this for the README of PHPUnit Polyfills, which for the "current" release should generally always point to the latest version of the PHPUnit docs.

Based on the above, this would mean the links in that README would need to be manually updated every couple of months, whenever there is a new PHPUnit minor (which is kind of a pain in the neck 😔).

Do you know if ReadTheDocs offers a feature to always link to the "latest" version of the docs ?

[sebastianbergmann]

Do you know if ReadTheDocs offers a feature to always link to the "latest" version of the docs?

It does, but I have it disabled by choice:

Permantently linking to https://docs.phpunit.de/en/main URLs does not make any sense to me as main will always be a moving target. The same holds true for latest, stable, etc.

[jrfnl]

@sebastianbergmann Guess I will just have to deal in that case. 🤷