Should we add EOL docs to an archive?

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Today, once Ansible 9 released, users can’t find Ansible 8 (eol) docs unless they know how to hack the url to replace /latest/ with the version number (8).

We’ve done it this way since the start of collections - only publish latest release and devel. One person asked us to provide a better way, perhaps an archive site for docs.

We do have one today where we put the really old docs (2.4-2.7). We did this not for findability, but to remove the older docs from Internet search results. Since we’ve used the /latest/ convention for many years now, we don’t have any search problems for releases 2.8 and later, so we haven’t archived any of them (and in fact, we couldn’t republish many of these older docs because our publishing environment has changed so much since then).

So instead of republishing, we could just create an archive index on Index of /archive or something that links to all the old docs in their current locations. I don’t think there’d be enough traffic to impact search results (for example returning Ansible 4 docs instead of /latest).

But would like to open this up to discussion and see what folks think. In general - do we need this? Are people looking for EOL docs for the Ansible package, etc?

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I like this solution.

My 2c. I have found legacy documentation particularly useful during migrations. A lot of installations lag behind in versions and need to lookup some docs to find how to migrate things that have been deprecated or changed when the time comes. What you propose above I think helps and doesn’t add a lot of overhead.

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