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Re: Web team summary for 2024



Hi Thomas and all

Thanks for the summary!

I continue inline...

El 12/7/25 a las 10:59, Thomas Lange escribió:
Hi all,

at the beginning of 2025 the press team asked Debian teams for a
summary of their activities in 2024. It seems that nothing was
published by the press team, and I forgot to post it in the
meantime. Here's what I've sent them:


What did the web team in 2024 ?

During 2024 the web team continued to clean up the web content. We
constantly put some effort into checking if the web pages are still up
to date and relevant for our users.

We overall removed 64200 files in the git repository (including 54300
security files and 8700 old news pages). The list of security
announcements now links to the mailing list archive.

- Instead of a detailed listing of former years of Debian partners we
   now only have a summary of them and focus on the partners that
   currently support Debian.

- More accurate translation statistics by ignoring more pages that do
   not need a translation (e.g. old voting infos, consultants and users
   pages) on https://www.debian.org/devel/website/stats/
   (in the past we listed 12.000+ pages to be translated, now less than 400 pages).

- Thomas Lange  did a talk in MiniDebConf Berlin about "Past and
   future changes to the Debian web pages". See
   https://peertube.debian.social/w/p/qAa36hNaYuk7n3SzKGpKkH or
   https://meetings-archive.debian.net/pub/debian-meetings/2024/MiniDebConf-Berlin/18-past-changes-and-future-plans-for-the-debian-web-pages.webm

These past months I have not been very active writing mails or committing work, but I think I managed to keep myself up to date reading mails and this summary and I watched the video talk referenced and helped, thanks!

- Our main download page (/distrib) uses more direct links to the
   ISOs, instead of pointing only to the torrents folders.

- We now have a nice table showing the recent releases and their
   support status

- Cleaned up old web pages of releases and only kept a small amount of important information:

   for old releases removed the installation guide and only kept the
   text version of release notes. Before we had 500+ different versions
   (including translations, different architectures, multiple formats)
   of the installation guide for one release and nearly 400 versions of
   the release notes. Removing those files also helped to get better
   web search results.

- We now have better search results by ignoring the web page footer
   (which made searching for a specific year impossible)
I think overall we are in a better situation with the website now, in the path of simplifying the codebase, getting better search results and reducing the machine power and time invested in building our pages. Hopefully this also helps for newcomers to feel the website codebase less overwhelming. I know that we lose some info and translations but I think the balance is positive taking into account the relatively small workforce we have in the team for maintaining al that...

- We generate the list of recent security announcements automatically.
   Before, for each DSA/DLA someone had to manually prepare two files.
   For more details see https://blog.fai-project.org/posts/security-webwml-removed/

- Removed outdated vendors of Debian installation media.

From my side I have to say that I am behind the preinstallvendors@ mail alias and I plan to review all the list and update it.

Another thing that has been done in the past months is an audit on the /users folder, done by Luis Muñoz (thanks!)


- Removed links to very old news and announcements. We keep the last 3
   years on the web pages and still have all original news and
   announcements in the mailing list archives. The web logs showed that
   there was not much demand from users.
When this was done I was a bit in a doubt about if we should keep all of them or maybe more years. But after thinking a bit more, I think it's better to keep some years (3 is fine) to keep the website small and smart (better search results). The news are always accessible via mailing list archives (yes, we lose the old translations, but for example many pages from old news include links to external website that get broken, and for this and other reasons those old pages need maintenance. There are other ways to get the info for the people interested in the past: mailing list archives, archive.org, or the git codebase. We could decide to make "static" the old stuff and move it to a different place (similar way the DebConf people do with the past DebConf websites) but again that needs somebody to take ownership of the task and do the work (and maintain that other website)...

- An outreachy intership for the web team was accepted and started in
   December 2024. Divine Attah-Ohiemi will work until March 2025 on the
   project "Make the Debian main website more attractive by switching
   to HuGo as site generator" https://dev.to/0xfaker
   This is a "proof-of-concept" to explore migrating the website from
   wml to HuGo as a static generator.

During this summer I expect to put much more time in Debian, re-review this project and think/play a bit with Hugo . Migrating to a new engine would also solve the "migration to HTML5" bug, and some other bugs related to layout, CSS etc. I will try to do bug triaging this summer, too.

Kind regards,

--
Laura Arjona Reina
https://wiki.debian.org/LauraArjona


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