-*- outline -*- Copyright (C) 2013-2023 Free Software Foundation, Inc. See the end of the file for license conditions. NOTES FOR EMACS WWW PAGES * Access Anyone with write access to the Emacs code repository has the same access to the web pages. See for instructions. After you commit a change to the CVS repository, it normally appears automatically on www.gnu.org within a few minutes. The basic procedure is: Initial checkout: cvs -z3 -d:ext:@cvs.savannah.gnu.org:/web/emacs co emacs Update from repository: cvs up -dP You can use Emacs's VC mode to commit files without having to worry about knowing CVS syntax. You may find M-x cvs-examine a useful, more specialized, alternative to M-x vc-dir. * Manual pages The scripts admin/make-manuals, admin/upload-manuals can be used to do a complete update of the on-line manual pages (e.g. after a release). * Renaming pages, redirects Sometimes you want to move a page to a new location. If the old location might be referenced somewhere else, you should add some form of redirect to the new location. There are several ways to do this: ** Use a refresh directive in the old file https://www.gnu.org/server/standards/README.webmastering.html#htaccess Change the entire contents of the old file to be something like: I can't think of any reason to use this method. ** Use a .symlinks file https://www.gnu.org/server/standards/README.webmastering.html#symlinks This is really an interface to mod_rewrite rules, but it acts like symlinks. Remove old-page.html altogether, and create a ".symlinks" file in the relevant directory, with contents of the form: # This is a comment line. old-page.html new-page.html Anyone visiting old-page.html will be shown the contents of new-page.html. Note that changes to .symlinks file are only updated periodically on the server via cron (twice an hour?). So there will be a delay (of up to 30 minutes?) before you see your changes take effect. This method is ok, but: i) a person visiting old-page.html has no idea that the page has moved. They still see old-page.html in their address bar. (In other words, the mod_rewrite rule does not use the [R] flag.) Sometimes this is what you want, sometimes not. ii) it doesn't work right if the new page is in a different directory to the old page: relative links from the visited page will break. ** Use a .htaccess file Remove old-page.html altogether, and create a ".htaccess" file in the relevant directory, with contents of the form: # This is a comment line. Redirect 301 /software/emacs/old-page.html /software/emacs/dir/new-page.html Use "301" for a permanent redirection, otherwise you can omit the number. Note that paths must (?) be relative to the top-level www.gnu.org. I think this is the best method. You can specify temporary or permanent redirects, and changes go live more-or-less straight away. This method is useful for making cross-references to non-Emacs manuals work; see manual/.htaccess in the repository. You only have to add a single redirect for every given external manual, you can redirect html_node to hmtl_node and html_mono to html_mono. * Why CVS? Savannah supports other VCS, and no-one is especially attached to CVS. Rather, CVS is the only supported mechanism for getting the changes onto www.gnu.org. See eg https://lists.gnu.org/r/bug-gnulib/2012-12/msg00072.html * CVS alternatives To use something other than CVS, convert the web-pages CVS repository to the other VCS, then set up a two-way sync between them. It needs to be two-way in case eg GNU webmasters make a change to the CVS. Ref e.g. https://github.com/mikjo/bigitr https://lists.gnu.org/r/savannah-hackers-public/2013-04/msg00022.html This file is part of GNU Emacs. GNU Emacs is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version. GNU Emacs is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details. You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with GNU Emacs. If not, see .