1076893 - Migrate or remove code samples under /samples/ dir

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(developer.mozilla.org Graveyard :: General, defect)

Description

[Florian Scholz (Open Web Docs)]

What did you do?
================
1. Saw a page linking to https://developer.mozilla.org/samples/domref/mozGetAsFile.html

What happened?
==============
Can't edit or remove it, because it is a static file on the server. I don't have access to it.

Outdated code samples, which we can't maintain, are bad.

What should have happened?
==========================
It should have been a (live) sample code on the MDN page.


Is there anything else we should know?
======================================
Can we get a list of the directories and files please?

The plan is probably to migrate or remove them from where they are now and put them on MDN directly.

Comment 1

[Luke Crouch [:groovecoder]]

https://pastebin.mozilla.org/6691078

Comment 2

[Florian Scholz (Open Web Docs)]

Thanks Luke!

I will probably file some sub bugs to migrate the files into the relevant Canvas/CSS/DOM/XUL content areas. Although, I guess XUL migration won't happen as we don't maintain those docs at the moment.

Do we have traffic or access data for these directories/files?

Comment 3

[Luke Crouch [:groovecoder]]

Hmm ... no, we don't. :(

We track clicks to *external* links, but since these URLs are at "developer.mozilla.org" we don't measure them.

Do we need to measure them to do this cleanup?

Comment 4

[Florian Scholz (Open Web Docs)]

It would be better, I think. 

We can't just delete stuff, if there is a ton of people accessing them. Once we remove links to those static resources from our wiki content, traffic should go down there. If it is still too high after a while, we also need to create redirects probably.

Comment 5

[Luke Crouch [:groovecoder]]

Filed https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1078676 for the measurement work.

Comment 6

[Florian Scholz (Open Web Docs)]

(In reply to Luke Crouch [:groovecoder] from comment #1)
> https://pastebin.mozilla.org/6691078

Luke, this pastebin is now empty. Can you please attach a list of the directories and files under /samples/ to this bug please? Thanks!

Comment 7

[Luke Crouch [:groovecoder]]

Attachment: 2015-10-21-samples-contents.txt

Comment 8

[John Whitlock [:jwhitlock]]

I think the slow-and-steady approach of the last five years has not been very successful, and it is time for a quicker solution.

My preference is to:

1. Publish a Github repo with these samples. I've started this as a private repo https://github.com/mozilla/mdn-legacy-files, when I thought we would bring the files under configuration management and might make changes. I think the large files should be added to the repo, and then it should be made public and moved to the https://github.com/mdn org, then archived to prevent further changes.

2. Stop serving files from /samples, /diagrams and /presentations (404)

3. Shut down the backing storage for these files, removing one more quirk of the MDN architecture.

This came up because I was asked if we could migrate mdn-legacy-files to a public repo. I'm against it because it would create a searchable index of the /samples folder, which may contain code that is dangerous to MDN or its users as long as they are being served from developer.mozilla.org. However, if MDN was no longer serving the files, I think an archived repo would be interesting for historical purposes, as well as a reference for migrating any broken samples to the live sample system or other current samples implementations.

Comment 9

[BMO Automation]

MDN Web Docs' bug reporting has now moved to GitHub. From now on, please file content bugs at https://github.com/mdn/sprints/issues/ and platform bugs at https://github.com/mdn/kuma/issues/.