Hi Martijn, I think making old versions of the docs unavailable except from the source feels a bit of an anti-pattern for the original intent of the web :) If a URL leads to specific content (even if it is out of date), changing where it leads is confusing.
I do agree that the out-of-date warning is very easy to miss though. I'd suggest we make the warning much more obvious - e.g. a pop-up modal, "Here be dragons, are you sure you want to read out of date info" with a link to the newer version. thanks, Robin. On Tue, 3 Feb 2026 at 06:27, Martijn Visser <[email protected]> wrote: > Hi everyone, > > I'd like to discuss how we handle documentation for unsupported Flink > versions, specifically by adding redirects to guide users toward current > documentation. > > The nightlies site currently hosts documentation for 25 Flink versions > (v1.0 through v2.2). Per our support policy [1], only the current and > previous minor versions receive bugfix support. That means 22 of these > documentation sets are for unsupported releases, with the exception being > 1.20 since it's the last LTS versions for the 1.x branch. > > We already display a banner on older docs stating "This documentation is > for an out-of-date version of Apache Flink. We recommend you use the latest > stable version." However, this banner is easy to overlook, and users > landing on these pages via search engines may not realize they're reading > outdated information until they've already invested time following > deprecated patterns or APIs. > > I'd like to propose that for documentation versions that are no longer > supported, we implement HTTP redirects to the equivalent page in the latest > stable docs. > > The main downside is that users maintaining legacy systems may need access > to old docs. However, documentation can always be accessed directly from > the source if necessary. > > Before writing a FLIP, I wanted to assess: > > - If there's support for this idea? > - What's the right threshold, meaning should we redirect everything outside > n-1, or apply a longer grace period? > > Looking forward to your thoughts. > > Best regards, > > Martijn > > [1] https://flink.apache.org/downloads/#update-policy-for-old-releases >
