broken links in building device adapters

[ianhi]

https://micro-manager.org/Micro-Manager_Device_Developer's_Kit_for_Windows

Searching for Device lead me to the above link as the first option. It has these broken links:

that said I think it would be best to delete that page and/or re-redirect to https://micro-manager.org/Building_Micro-Manager_Device_Adapters

[marktsuchida]

We have quite a few obsolete pages, so it's good to think about this in general terms.

• IMHO it's not a big problem if links to totally obsolete pages like this turn into a 404. People can simply search for the information they were looking for, and most people are not software historians (and if they are, they can look at Git history)
• We could either delete pages like this (they will still be preserved in the Git history), or move them to an archive directory (say, _pages/archive, and see if we can make the search ignore that directory)
  • But if they won't be searchable, we might as well not have them at all
  • Also, moving pages is more work than deleting them (although both require updating any internal links to the pages in question), especially in terms of future maintenance
• If we want to preserve some degree of access to historical information, we could maybe have a "Deleted Pages" page (and possibly include a link to it from our 404 page)
  • This page can link to GitHub URLs of the last commit that had the page, so that we can keep around pointers to removed pages without actually keeping around the pages
  • One reason for having such a page is to have a hand-curated list of only content that is of some historical significance (as opposed to automatically finding all deletions in Git history, which would turn up a lot of noise)
  • This page will mostly serve the occasional needs of core maintainers (and possibly others). For example, almost nobody these days should care what the Device Kits were, but they are still mentioned in a (very) few places in our code repository. So it might be nice for the website to at least mention Device Kits somewhere, with some pointers
  • Okay, to be honest, the real purpose of having such a pages is to give us courage to ruthlessly delete obsolete pages
• Personally I would also be fine with simply deleting; we just need to be aware that archaeological information can be found in a full Git history search when needed

@nicost Do you have any opinions?