The old developers documentation snapshot has been permanently retired, as all its content has effectively been moved to the new developers documentation website, or it’s irrelevant to anything that was released in the past 14 years.
Various redirections have already been put in place for API references that have been moved elsewhere, like Network Manager and the C++ bindings.
If there are missing references it mainly means that the corresponding libraries are not updating or publishing their documentation. Please, file an issue on their corresponding issue tracker.
developer.gnome.org [1] → developer-old.gnome.org [2] plus a new website at developer.gnome.org [3] (which is equal to [1]).
What about all the links that pointed to [1] and haven’t been updated to [2]?
The grep command that you posted only searches [2].
Edit: so if I understand correctly the [1] links are all redirected (either to [3] or outside), so it’s not a big problem to keep the old URLs around. Ideally the [1] links also need to be updated, but is not essential. (to search all the [1] links, a different method is necessary, by requesting the URL and detect if there is a redirection).
Don’t know but I fill like the old was very easy to navigate the new version is sometimes a little confusing. in the old version things was arranged by topic it was clear but with the new it is not…for example look at the “function” for GLib or Gtk it takes some time to find elements.
The old documentation of GLib and GTK were generated with GTK-Doc, now these projects use gi-docgen.
It was already discussed on Discourse. It seems to me that many people don’t like the change (me included). And API documentation is something essential for developers, so changing something as fundamental as that must be done carefully.
It seems to you because you’re looking only to the people that don’t like it, as confirmation bias.
It took nearly a decade of broken library-web and gtk-doc, and yet nobody stepped up to make something better, because nobody really cared, as long as they didn’t have to change anything.
In the meantime, everybody else moved over to different documentation platforms—from MSDN, to Swift, to Rust, to Python, to JavaScript. Yes, not everyone likes new things; nothing is ever going to be liked by everybody, and trying to serve everybody is a great way to make everybody differently unhappy.
If you think you can do better, feel free to do so, and put your money where your mouth is.
I find the presentation of gi-docgen a lot less relevant than the indirect benefits.
I liked some things about the output of gtk-doc, but the improvements to annotations, cross-linking and documentation comments in libraries just got better as a result of gi-docgen. Even if you don’t like gi-docgen it made it a lot easier to write other output generators.
There’s also nothing forcing projects to migrate to gi-docgen; most of us just are because we want to.