Many documentation and faq links are broken on root.cern.ch

ROOT
1

This seems to have been noticed before, more than a year ago, and nothing was done.
(Link Broken in FAQ on Website)

I really appreciate all the excellent documentation and examples that exists about ROOT, however,
it appears that nearly all links to topics that are found by search are broken, even when using the search from within the root.cern.ch pages. This makes it really slows down productivity, because it gets a lot harder to find information when search isn’t working.

Example: Search “Proof” from the root.cern.ch search box. Skipping the first 3 ads, the next three non-advertising links are all “Not Found” when clicked. At least 5 of the 6 top links don’t work. This is very frustrating, especially for new students starting to work with ROOT.

Please read tips for efficient and successful posting and posting code

ROOT Version: Not Provided
Platform: Not Provided
Compiler: Not Provided

2

Hi,
FYI we just moved to a new web site and unfortunately the Google search link results still refer to the old one… This should improve with time.

3

OK. Could you please point me then to where on the new website I would find the old pages for “https://root.cern/proof/”, or “https://root.cern/starting-proof/” or “https://root.cern/faq/” ?
As it is right now I don’t quite know how to find these pages.

4

It seems to be missing. @couet can you take a look?

5

Faqs and howtos are supposed to be in the the forum now. Some old faqs have not been moved. Concerning proof I guess @ganis said the proof stuff should not be moved.
For now old faq can be seen here https://root.cern/d/howtos.html (temporarily)

6

Thank you for your reply.
The temporary FAQ has only links none of which can be found.

I am a bit concerned about your documentation and how I can continue to figure out how to use some of the more technical aspects of ROOT.

All the pages that used to have nice explanations on how to do things, such as the ones mentioned above, or https://root.cern/configuring-xproofd-or-proof-plugin-xrootd/ or https://root.cern/roofit/ or https://root.cern/cms-γ-mva-discrimination/ etc, are now missing. This makes it much more difficult to do more advanced things with ROOT. I must admit I miss these previously available pages.

Is there a way to resurrect them?

7

a static copy of the old web site has been done here: ROOT a Data analysis Framework | ROOT a Data analysis Framework
proof is now obsolete … @ganis can confirm. roofit should be available in the new web site in the Manual section (@moneta can comment if something is missing) …

8

I have been trying the RDataFrame, and I like a lot of the features. It works great with a “flat ntuple”, containing primitives and vectors. Unfortunately, I found it very, very difficult to figure out how to use this with a TTree that contains complicated classes written with TClonesArray (or vector<Myclass *>), and that make use of TRef and TRefArray. Is there any documentation on RDataFrame that goes beyond the tutorials, all of which seem to use “flat ntuples”, and show how to use more complicated classes? Given that I have many terabytes of root trees written this way, converting them would be expensive.

9

I guess @eguiraud can give you more details about RDataFrame tutorials.

10

Hi @maurik,
thank you for the feedback, much appreciated! The discussion about the broken links is now https://github.com/root-project/web/issues/320, it might be that we can do something about that.

About RDataFrame: the reason there are no dedicated tutorials to TClonesArrays is that modulo bugs (:sweat_smile:) using TClonesArrays should work exactly the same as using other arrays. I’d be curious to hear more about the issues you encountered. I am not sure about TRef and TRefArray. Again, please open a bug report or a thread on the forum, I would be interested in seeing what we can do to improve your experience.

Cheers,
Enrico

11

Thank you all for the replies and for looking into restoring some of the documentation!
I will ask more about RDataFrame in a separate thread.

12

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