Re: [boost] What happened to boost-root/index.htm?

From: Rene Rivera (grafikrobot_at_[hidden])
Date: 2008-02-21 12:27:29

Beman Dawes wrote:
> Rene Rivera wrote:
>> Beman Dawes wrote:
>>> boost-root/index.htm has been deleted and boost-root/readme.html has 
>>> been added.
>>>
>>> Is the intent that readme.html becomes the new home page?
>> The intent is for it to become the new start page. The web site has it's 
>> own home page.
>>
>>> That would be a breaking change for the many user's who have links on 
>>> their own pages to Boost's index.htm in their local installation of Boost.
>> OK, which users?
> 
> Here is the scenario I see with my consulting clients. They have a 
> standard place they install Boost. Their own documentation then links to 
> Boost at that standard location. For example, a document I was just 
> reading listed the third-party libraries the project uses, and each had 
> a link to the home page for that library. So the Boost link was to 
> index.htm in boost-root at their standard location. The link isn't to 
> the Boost web site because they aren't interested in Boost as it is 
> today, but in Boost as of the version they are using.

Ah, right.

>>> "index.htm" was an unfortunate choice of name, so I think the current 
>>> reorganization would be a good time to change the home page to 
>>> "index.html". But we will still need "index.htm" to avoid breaking user 
>>> links (not to mention our own links!), although it can just redirect to 
>>> "index.html".
>>>
>>> We could also have a "readme.html" that redirects to "index.html", 
>>> although it seem unnecessary to me.
>> Why not just have an index.htm that redirects to readme.html? Note, I 
>> did the "readme.html" because there was another unfortunate superfluous 
>> file at the root "README" that just told people to look at the "index.htm".
> 
> We certainly could have readme.html be the home page, and index.htm 
> redirect to it. But I think we ought to get rid of README and 
> readme.html. Those names seem like hold-overs from the last century. 
> Isn't "index.html" the modern practice as the name of the starting 
> point? "index.htm" would just redirect, and is only being kept to 
> prevent breaking existing links.

Hm, I may not be "young" enough to make a judgment as to how "outdated" 
a "readme(.html)" is. But a quick search in Google points to more than 
400K instances of "readme.html". And most of them seem to be precisely 
in software distributions. So it seems that it's still an expected start 
point for this case.

But I'll do whatever you decide :-)

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