[Development] Harmonizing the Qt 5.x Documentation

[André Pönitz]

Shawn wrote:
> On 2 Apr 2014, at 6:07 PM, Ariel Molina wrote:
> > 
> > Please whatever you do, do not break this anymore, the current
> > state is already messed up.
>
> I agree.  But I think the idea was to change it one last time and then 
> never change it again, and the docs that google finds should be always
> the latest rather than a particular version.  I hope that goal is achieved...

I hope the same, and hope dies last... 

Experience is another thing, though. Judging from the last half-dozen or so
changes redirection worked better in theory than in practice.

If it fails (and it will...) it takes a year or more for search engines to
catch up.

Right now the first Google hit I get for QString is 4.8, the second is 5(.2), 
which, while not perfect, might get tagged "good enough".

Bing finds 4.8, followed by a long-dead doc.qt.nokia.com/4.6/qstring.html
followed by some reference in wikibooks and a generic (and useless) 
like to the top-level Qt 5 docs at qt-project.org/doc/qt. Ouch.

Yahoo gets 4.8 first, a stackoverflow thread pointing to the 5.2 docs
as runner-up. Arguably tolerable, but not perfect either.


And search engines are only part of the problem. The other part is that
there is a lot of valuable information and solutions for Qt developers 
on sites like stackoverflow or qtcentre, with problem solutions often 
linking to back to Qt documentation.

Activities like moving documentation or other referenced data around, 
changing host names etc. impact such "folklore" badly and directly 
destroy value.

Andre'