The original thread got derailed, so here is what I think the issue is. When a project is moved to the attic, its website is updated to show a banner that the project has been retired, with a link to the attic.
Also, its release files on www.apache.org/dist are removed, and replaced with an .htaccess redirect to an Attic page with summary details of the project. e.g. http://www.apache.org/dist/harmony redirects to http://attic.apache.org/projects/harmony.html Whilst this redirect works, and is simple to administer, it means there are many directories under www.apache.org/dist/ which only contain an .htaccess file, and scripts may have to be aware of which directories correspond to active projects. It would be useful to be able to tidy this up. However it is important that the redirects are kept as there are likely to be links to the download location in lots of places. We should not break URLs unnecessarily. Note that the redirects also work on mirror links as well as on the ASF hosts. This behaviour should be preserved as historical links will generally use the dynamic mirror system. For example the harmony download page [1] points to the mirrors; externally preserved links are likely to do so as well. Removing the .htaccess files and their parent directories will break all the links, so IMO that is not an option. AFAIK .htaccess files are inherited from the parent directory, so it should be possible to move the individual redirects to a shared parent .htaccess file. This needs to be tested. [1] http://harmony.apache.org/download.cgi
