MySQL Bugs: #72007: Broken links in the manual

Bug #72007	Broken links in the manual
Submitted:	11 Mar 2014 11:14	Modified:	25 Apr 2014 4:02
Reporter:	Hartmut Holzgraefe	Email Updates:
Status:	Closed	Impact on me:	None
Category:	MySQL Server: Documentation	Severity:	S3 (Non-critical)
Version:	5.6	OS:	Any
Assigned to:	Paul DuBois	CPU Architecture:	Any

Description:
A quick check with "wget --spider" over all http(s) URLs in the 5.6 manual HTML download ( http://downloads.mysql.com/docs/refman-5.6-en.html-chapter.tar.gz ) reported the problems listed below. Other URLs like e.g. http://blogs.mysql.com/peterg/2008/05/19/instructions-for-adding-a-new-unicode-collation/ did end up in a "200 OK" status code instead of "404 not found", but get redirected to a more general URL (http://planet.mysql.com/ in this case) that does not provide the originally linked content at all, this is something that needs to be checked manually and can't be found by a simple script solution that relies on HTTP redirects just being a pointer to a new URL for the same content ...

Problems reported by "wget --spider": 

http://dev.mysql.com/user-groups/:
Remote file does not exist -- broken link!!!

http://directory.google.com/Top/Computers/Internet/Protocols/SSH/Clients/Windows/:
Remote file does not exist -- broken link!!!

http://edelivery.oracle.com/oraclevm
20 redirections exceeded.

http://mysql.hitstar.com/
wget: unable to resolve host address ‘mysql.hitstar.com’

https://dev.mysql.com/tech-resources/articles/nosql-to-mysql-with-memcached.html:
Remote file does not exist -- broken link!!!

https://edelivery.oracle.com/oraclevm
20 redirections exceeded.

http://servers.digitaldaze.com/extensions/perl/modules.html:
Remote file does not exist -- broken link!!!

https://support.mysql.com/
Timeout

http://www.mysql.com/partners/software/:
Remote file does not exist -- broken link!!!

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/IPv6:
Remote file does not exist -- broken link!!!

http://web.archive.org/web/20070409075643rn_1/www.dbazine.com/db2/db2-disarticles/gulutzan...:
Remote file does not exist -- broken link!!!

http://www.deveiate.org/projects/RMemCache:
Remote file does not exist -- broken link!!!

http://www.dolphinics.com/support/sci-product-documentation-software.html:
Remote file does not exist -- broken link!!!

http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc2195.html:
Remote file does not exist -- broken link!!!

http://www.opengroup.or.jp/jvc/cde/sjis-euc-e.html:
Remote file does not exist -- broken link!!!

http://www.pspl.co.in/konark/
wget: unable to resolve host address ‘www.pspl.co.in’

http://pu.inf.uni-tuebingen.de/users/knauel/myscsh/:
Remote file does not exist -- broken link!!!

http://www.redhat.com/mirrors/LDP/HOWTO/html_single/Linux+IPv6-HOWTO/:
Remote file does not exist -- broken link!!!

http://www.serpentine.com/software/mysql:
Remote file does not exist -- broken link!!!

http://www.ssh.com/
wget: unable to resolve host address ‘www.ssh.com’

How to repeat:
download and unpack HTML "per chapter" manual tarball or ZIP

extract absolute http(s) URLs with

  grep -Pho 'href=".*?"' *.html | sed -e 's/^href="//g' -e's/"$//g' | grep ^http | sort | grep -v "support.mysql.com" | uniq > urls.txt

(support.mysql.com is excluded as it causes wget to hang, even with --timeout set to a low value)

then check URLs with "wget --spider" (causing only HEAD requests without retrieving actual page content):

  cat urls.txt | xargs wget --timeout=5 --spider -nv

  

Suggested fix:
a) fix broken URLs

b) have URLs being checked as part of the DocBook -> HTML toolchain

Thank you for the bug report.

Thank you for the detailed bug report. These URLs have been updated/replaced, and we will check and update them more regularly.