Ivy URL shows page not found

[Arihant416]

Description

On updating angular version 11 to 12, the CLI shows a message

For additional information or if the build fails, please see Ivy Guide
The URL opens up to show page not found.

What is the affected URL?

https://angular.io/guide/ivy

Please provide the steps to reproduce the issue

You can reproduce this issue by pasting the URL on the browser directly or by redirecting from the CLI message.

Please provide the expected behavior vs the actual behavior you encountered

Expected behavior

• There should have been some documentation about the Ivy compiler

Actual behavior

• The URL redirects to a Page Not Found page.

Please provide a screenshot if possible

Please provide the exception or error you saw

No response

Is this a browser-specific issue? If so, please specify the device, browser, and version.

No response

[JoostK]

This happens because the page has since been removed as obsolete in v14+, but older versions of Angular always link to just angular.io instead of a particular version; in this case that would be https://v12.angular.io/docs, which is still available.

We have an issue #44650 to reflect the version of Angular in links to documentation.

As for this specific problem, let's see what @gkalpak's thoughts are here.

[gkalpak]

I see that the Ivy-related guides have been removed in #43860.
For those that we use in CLI/compiler error messages, we could create redirects to v12.angular.io, but I am not sure if it was a conscious choice not to do this. Maybe @dgp1130 remembers.

[dgp1130]

I think we just never got around to linking errors messages to the current version of Angular. There's a lot of error messages with links like this and they would need to be updated for every major version, which can lead to a lot of churn.

One alternative approach to consider is to leave a "tombstone" in angular.io which tells users "This doc is deleted, but it previously existed in vX - link". Not sure how hard that is to do, but it's one solution to this problem.

I do agree that the ideal solution is for errors messages to link to their versions of the documentation. It's just something which hasn't been prioritized.

[gkalpak]

Thx for the insights, @dgp1130!

So, until version-specific links in errors are implemented, I think it makes sense to address the issue for the Ivy guide (and any other URLs that you might know are linked to from error messages but no longer exist on angular.io.

We could do the "tombstone" thing, but "tombstone" haven worked particularly well for the Angular team in the past 😛
What we've typically done in such cases is add a (server-side) redirect (for example, in this case, from angular.io/guide/ivy to v12.angular.io/guide/ivy). Any objections with that?

[dgp1130]

Sounds reasonable to me. I could see some users getting confused about why they're getting redirected to older versions, but it's probably more important to get them to the content they want in the easiest way possible.

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