For years now, we have added links to apps.ubuntu.com with pretty little icons and banners. Recent consensus is that we should stop adding those links (I agree).
However, the existing links had at least some value, until now. Their target pages used to have buttons with the apt:// URLs, so even if the site didn't have recent releases, visitors could have conceivably used those buttons to install the software.
No longer:
$ curl -I https://apps.ubuntu.com/cat/applications/vlc
HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently
Date: Wed, 13 Jun 2018 11:22:14 GMT
Server: Apache
Location: https://snapcraft.io/store
Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1
The redirection makes no attempt to use the original URL, so users who click on such links are faced with a search page:
I think this makes for terrible UX.
As I see it, we don't have many options. We can:
remove such URLs as we come across them
or go on a rampage
ask SE to mass-remove them (not likely to happen, but probably worth a shot)
ask Canonical to use the package name as a search term:
https://apps.ubuntu.com/cat/applications/vlc -> https://snapcraft.io/search?q=vlc
This way, the links retain some marginal utility (though I assume the vast majority of "applications" on apps.ubuntu.com haven't become snaps).
4. Change these to http://apt.ubuntu.com/p/... (as suggested by @dessert). There are ~1500 posts with this URL vs ~2800 posts with apps.ubuntu.com.
- Possibly by asking either SE to do so or Canonical to change the redirect.
Thoughts?