pandas: DOC: 404 Error when trying to switch doc versions from 1.4.4 version page

Thanks for offering to help with this @tiffanyxiao.

I’m unsure you’ll be able to get the approach of redirects working.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but to recap the issue with the version switcher in our docs:

• Up to 1.3 there is no dropdown
• Docs for 1.4 have a broken dropdown
• Since 1.5 the dropdown works as expected

For 1.4 when selecting for example 2.1 the dropdown takes the user to https://pandas.pydata.org/2.1, which is not a valid link.

We have a redirect system for our docs, but it only captures links within our docs (it creates html files in our docs). You won’t be able to create a 2.1.html file our root, and also the html extension can be an issue.

I can do that myself in our nginx configuration, but I don’t think I like the option of having a broken link and a redirect for it so much.

I’ll be checking later in our website analytics how many visits you are getting in these old versions, if they are minimal, I suggest that we simply remove old version from the dropdown, and leave 1.5 as the first version.

If 1.4 and older versions receive a significant amount of visits, maybe patching the generated 1.4 docs is a better option (just patching one version should be enough, and maybe only modifying a single js file is enough, I need to check).

The documentation for old versions was generated during the release and never updated after that. The pydata sphinx theme changed how the version switcher goes, and since the versions.json file is global for old versions (as it needs to be updated for all with nee versions), not sure if there is much we can do.

Can’t check myself right now, but two ideas:

• Use absolute paths for the links to the versions in versions.json, that may work
• Maintain two versions of versions.jsons (make a copy and use it for future releases)