Hi Everyone, Component documentation is currently only published to https://maven.apache.org/ when a component releases. This makes documentation fixes for rarely released components, or updates to already released components, effectively complicated.
I would like to propose moving the source of version-independent narrative documentation into maven-site.git, where a commit would republish the changes immediately. To understand the scope, I measured the current estate: there are 1,068 hand-written site pages across our repositories. While 521 are Velocity pages, 396 of those use nothing beyond component identity, version, and escapes. This means 88% of the pages are portable if maven-site can supply a component's current version to a page. We already half-do this today: Update.java maintains the version columns of the plugins and shared index pages, though it currently gets its numbers by scraping the component's own published page. This would need to be re-based on an authoritative source first. The site checkers in maven-dist-tool share this same dependency. Importantly, published URLs would not break under this approach: - Where a component's generated output is a small, stable set of directories, maven-site can own the path and symlink only those back, leaving the URL untouched. - Where this is not possible, a redirect in our existing .htaccess file can be used. For example, the maven-checkstyle-plugin redirects have successfully survived many releases. - Archived, versioned sites would remain unaffected either way. I have written up the full details, measurements, and open questions here: https://github.com/apache/maven-site/issues/1647 I am particularly interested in refreshing this discussion now, as I have recently moved many pages from APT to Markdown, which should make future contributions and refactoring much easier. Regards, Sylwester
