Once a URL has been published to the web, it needs to be available in all future releases, even if the topic is renamed, moved, or deprecated. So we need a mechanism for making sure that all published URLs continue to resolve to content in future refreshes / releases. For deprecated topics we may need a deprecated content notice, or a redirection mechanism to take people to updated content.
Currently Skynet generates an output web of html, packages it and mails it out. It has no knowledge of the output beyond that. Perhaps we need Skynet to have the ability to hold awareness of a "release" and iterations of that release, checking the referential integrity between the two.
Perhaps a better term for this is "stable" urls. Our published urls represent a public-facing API to our documentation, and people hook their browsers up to this API via bookmarking. So we need to maintain a stable API across all iterations of a major release.
*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 783356 ***
I want to reopen this RFE. It differs from 783356, which is about human readable URLs. This request is specifically for a "stable URL" implementation across a release. A URL may be "pretty" (human-readable) or not, it may even change, but the point of this RFE is that once published, a URL for a topic should continue to resolve. URLs should be either: (a) Unchangeable once a document has been published (b) Able to be tracked such that we can automatically generate redirect rules so that bookmarks to the published topic continue to resolve, even when we change the URL. (a) makes sense if URLs were machine-readable only, then there would be no need to allow for editing; but if topic URLs are human-readable for SEO and for human readability, then it doesn't make sense to make them rigidly unchangeable. If something is wrong in human-readable text, then it needs to be corrected. In this case (b) makes sense. So URLs might change, and we need a mechanism for stable and persistent URLs through automatic redirects.
You have to go through some hijinks to change the URL now so I think it is reasonably stable. Closing.