[Bioc-devel] Bioconductor package not found with Google search result link

[Seth Falcon]

Hi again,

On 5/3/10 10:10 AM, Seth Falcon wrote:
> On 5/3/10 8:52 AM, Sean Davis wrote:
>> On Mon, May 3, 2010 at 11:09 AM, James W. MacDonald
>> <jmacdon at med.umich.edu> wrote:
>>> It appears Google doesn't have the current index of the Bioc website. The
>>> URI you want is
>>>
>>> http://www.bioconductor.org/packages/2.6/bioc/html/ChIPpeakAnno.html
>>
>> And the following URL will get the most recent release, whatever that may be.
>>
>> http://www.bioconductor.org/packages/release/bioc/html/ChIPpeakAnno.html

Yes, both of the above URLs work and are the intended URLs for a
package.  As you mention the /packages/release/... URLs will always
point to the current release which will change over time.  Such URLs
will go 404 if a given package drops out of the Bioconductor releases.

So the /packages/release/... URLs have the convenience of always being
current, but don't have the permanence that one might want when, e.g.,
referencing software used for a particular analysis.

>>>>  http://www.bioconductor.org/packages/bioc/html/ChIPpeakAnno.html
>>
>> It will be interesting to hear from the Seattle folks, as I'm not sure
>> that this was ever a valid URL?

Well it somewhat depends on what "valid" means ;-)

This URL did resolve to the current release, but it represents a very
out-dated repository layout that existed before Bioconductor had
separate annotation and experiment data package repositories.

We have added a "moved permanently" redirect so the above link (and
those similar to it) resolve again.

That path is also now excluded from indexing via robots.txt (but this
can take awhile to be updated).  We have added the task of generating a
proper site map for bioconductor.org to our TODO list which should also
help with these sort of issues.


+ seth