Documentation of previous versions missing

[dharsanb]

Have you read the Contributing Guidelines on issues?

• I have read the Contributing Guidelines on issues.

Description

Documentation links in the Versions page have expired. Either they must say documentation not available or not display the versions anymore. Eg: Version 2.0.0-beta.22 points to Netlify link which does not exist.

Self-service

• I'd be willing to address this documentation request myself.

[Josh-Cena]

Interesting, I wonder if anything happened to Netlify's storage of snapshots.

[slorber]

Hmmm that's really annoying 😓 will contact Netlify support to see what is happening.

[slorber]

Apparently, the React website was probably also affected by this issue.

They also used such permalinks before for older versions, which are all offline now: https://17.reactjs.org/versions)
Older Netlify deployment permalinks were removed in reactjs/react.dev#4482 (versions.yml file diff)

[slorber]

Apparently, it's a Netlify deployment retention policy change from a few months ago:
https://www.netlify.com/blog/automated-deploy-cleanup-and-new-deploy-retention-policies/

There's no way to restore those deployments 😅
In our cases, those are alpha/beta/rc so we can probably just delete them, although I understand it can be annoying for some users that are still using older versions.

But it's a problem for the future because our versioned deployment strategy now does not work anymore. I configured the retention to the max value of 365 days but it's only a temporary workaround, and we can't archive 2.0.1 with that policy. Will have to figure out a new archiving process, probably requiring the creation of a docs archive git branch. We'll see how to do that once we will archive 2.0.1.

[slorber]

Note: I'm waiting for an answer from someone at Meta to see how we decide to archive older versions for Meta open-source sites.

The archiving process options I proposed are described on the React-Native-Website repo here: facebook/react-native-website#3819