I suppose that this is not exactly news, but I noticed recently that as part of its 'transition' of sun.com (aka getting rid of sun.com), Oracle has of course gotten rid of docs.sun.com as well. Just as they've done with other sun.com properties, there are no specific redirections for old docs.sun.com URLs; all URLs now wind up on a generic Oracle documentation website.

So let me summarize that: Oracle broke all old links to Sun documentation.

All of those links to Sun docs that are in our documentation and notes, and perhaps yours as well? Dead. All of those links on people's web pages that say some variant of 'and here's the official documentation for more information'? Dead. All of those URLs for manuals that you were going to get around to reading sometime? Well, you get the theme here. This is an especially annoying situation for docs.sun.com because the documentation URLs that Sun used were so meaningless by themselves. If all you have is an old URL, you probably now have essentially no chance of figuring out what manual it went to so that you can look it up on the new Oracle documentation site.

I'm aware that this is nothing new for old Sun URLs, and that some of the things that have happened as a result are much more annoying and troublesome. It's just that for some reason, this particular set of URLs going away really gets to me (partly, I admit, because I have some links to Sun documentation in WanderingThoughts entries, links that are now dead).

(For a somewhat more important example, ZFS error status URLs now redirect to something that wants you to log in to Oracle's support system. They may or may not work after you do that.)