I got some feedback from the Oracle documentation team, based on my recent post.
GUIDs
One of the concerns I raised was about how the GUIDs would be used in different releases of the documentation. Although I don’t like the look of the GUIDs, I can understand why they might be more convenient that trying to think of a neat, descriptive, human readable slug. My concern was the GUID might be unique for every incarnation of the same page. That is, a new GUID for the same page for each patchset, DB version and/or minor text correction. That would make it really hard to flick between versions, as you couldn’t predict what the page was called in each variant.
It seems my worries were unfounded. The intention is the GUID of a specific page will stay the same, regardless of patchset, DB version or document correction. That’s great news!
Broken Links
The team are trying to put some stuff in place to correct the broken links. I think I might know who is developing this solution. 🙂
The quick fix will be to direct previously broken links to the table of contents page of the appropriate manual. Later, they will attempt to provide topic-to-topic links. No promises here, but it sounds promising.
Conclusion
I’m going to continue to fix the broken links on my site as I want to maintain the direct topic links in the short term, but this sounds like really good news going forward.
It also sounds like the documentation team are feeling our pain and putting stuff in place to prevent this happening in future, which is fantastic news! 🙂
Note to self: It’s much better to engage with the right people and discuss the issue, rather than just bitch about stuff.
Cheers
Tim…
Feedback from the Oracle documentation team : https://t.co/PDJDPAsszl
RT @oraclebase: Feedback from the Oracle documentation team : https://t.co/PDJDPAsszl
RT @oraclebase: Feedback from the Oracle documentation team : https://t.co/PDJDPAsszl
Feedback from the Oracle documentation team @oraclebase http://t.co/6i7DatIe0s #OrclDBA #odtug
“Note to self: It’s much better to engage with the right people and discuss the issue, rather than just bitch about stuff.”
For what it’s worth — I don’t think you did the wrong thing. An issue existed. You used your soap box to raise awareness of it. Others (including me) borrowed your soap box to acknowledge that the problem was causing widespread pain. Now the problem is being fixed.
Would the problem have been fixed otherwise? Maybe. Maybe not. If no one complained, then why would Oracle spend resources fixing something no one had indicated was broken. If nothing else, I am confident that the problem will be fixed *faster* since you shined a spotlight on it.