Permanent Links for Motions #456
Conversation
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Just flagging that there are quite a lot of motion reference changes proposed here, so care needs to be taken depending on the order these PRs would be applied. |
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Yeah, I almost mentioned this in that PR, but in any case, it's very easy to search and replace with a regular expression, so it would take less than 5 minutes to fix it again. (\d+.\d+.\d+(\s|%20)-(\s|%20)). |
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@thewca/software-team could this break something on the actual website? Does the WCA website link to the motions anywhere? @Nanush7 it would be good to set up PRs for our other repos that have these links, as you mentioned. |
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I ran grep with the regex on the website's repo and I didn't find any link to a motion (in the static content). I have already opened a PR for the regulations repository: thewca/wca-regulations#1276. I'll do it for the translations repo soon. |
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No technical objections from my side. There are no usages of direct links on the website as far as I am concerned, but to be honest I don't have a definitive list in my head. So there might be some obscure corner of the code which I am overlooking. Glad to fix that as it comes up, though. In a broader context, I want to advise against this change. I understand the basic issue that prompted you to come up with this PR, but I don't believe it is an adequate solution. One of the main reasons why our Motions are numbered in the first place is so that we can uniquely identify and point to them. Or to be precise, point to the specific Motion at a specific point in time. Numberings change, indentations break, and a snippet of text referencing something like "according to point 5.1 of the WQAC motion" might ironically be out-of-date with this change if the numbering 5.1 changes. Most legislations of actual states do things like marking law paragraphs as "dropped" or "invalid" instead of dropping them altogether. This is done precisely with the intention to keep old "links" (i.e. often it's printed references) intact. That being said, if there is strong consensus on this issue from all other parties, then I won't stand in your way. But I personally strongly advise against it. |
Something like "according to point 5.1 of the WQAC motion" might still be out of date without this change if you see it written somewhere.
But we don't do that anyway. If the link is outdated, then the only way to see the outdated text is by looking at the commit history. Furthermore, you can still see the number inside the document. So you can say "as per point X of the xx.yy.zz - name Motion", and you would be able to figure if the motion was updated since the reference was made. I can offer you the following alternative: Just like it is right now, we host the files with the numbered filenames, and the links on the website point to those files (i.e. if you open a motion in the documents page, you get the file with the number on its name). However, we would also have the files without the number, so that the committees/teams can use those links when appropriate and don't worry about broken links anymore. I guess there should be an easy way to do this without duplicating the actual files (e.g. redirects). Also, it might be questionable, but even if we duplicated the files, it shouldn't have a significant impact on storage usage, since we don't have that many motions anyway, and it would be an easy change to the deployment script. |
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Storage space is of no concern here. So adding permalinks is definitely a viable solution. The prize question becomes: What direction do the links point in? Will it be that "Spirit.pdf" is a permalink that points to "2000-XY-Spirit.pdf" or the other way around? Also, I want to reiterate that I don't have any pressing objections against this PR. If you all feel that the current solution is the best, I won't stand in your way. Just felt the need to point out you might end up replacing one problem with another. |
I don't know if I got you right, but you should get the numbered version in the URL when accessing the document, so that if you copy the URL to make a reference, you point to the numbered version by default.
I know, but your concern is valid. I even mentioned it in the issue: "The only reason I see to keep the links as they are, is to make it clear that a referenced motion has been updated since it was referenced (e.g., if referenced in an announcement or email)". |
Proposed solution: rename motions to remove the number and date (this information is still present on each document).
I have also changed all the links to motions in this repository. There are more references to motions in the wca-regulations and wca-regulations-translations repositories. I'll submit the required changes in those places.
Closes #453.