[Docs] Broken and inconsistent links in the development documentation #57

Describe the bug, including details regarding any error messages, version, and platform.

A crawl of the development documentation (https://arrow.apache.org/docs/dev/, build 26.0.0.dev290, 3,832 pages, 2026-09-25) found a number of broken and inconsistent links. The crawl checked every <a>, <link>, <img> and <script> target, plus same-site #fragment anchors. It checked apache/arrow GitHub source and edit links against the main tree.

Paths below are relative to https://arrow.apache.org/docs/dev/.

Broken links with a clear fix in the repo

1. "Edit on GitHub" is broken on every autogenerated pyarrow API page (830 pages). Pages under python/generated/ link to .../edit/main/docs/source/python/generated/<name>.rst. Autosummary creates those files at build time, and they are not checked in.
2. python/parquet.html returns 404. The Python Parquet docs were split into python/parquet/ without a redirect. The stable URL will break the same way at the next release.
3. developers/continuous_integration/crossbow.html has relative targets conda-recipes, python-wheels and linux-packages, which all 404 (crossbow.rst). The conda recipes were removed from dev/tasks.
4. developers/python/development.html: `building the project <build_pyarrow>`_ is treated as a URL, which 404s. It should be a :ref:.
5. R vignettes:
   • r/articles/data_wrangling.html links to developers/writing_bindings.html, which was removed.
   • r/articles/developers/binary_features.html links to ../../install.html (404). The target should be ../install.html.
   • r/articles/developers/setup.html has a stale anchor #step-3-building-arrow.
   • r/articles/install.html has a stale anchor fs.html#s3-and-gcs-support.
   • r/articles/developers/docker.html links to the old docs/developers/{docker,crossbow}.html locations (404).
6. Java docs links point to https://arrow.apache.org/docs/java/ (404) from python/integration/python_java.html and from the R pkgdown navbar (r/_pkgdown.yml). The Java docs are at https://arrow.apache.org/java/current/.
7. developers/guide/resources.html links to r/articles/install.html#install-the-nightly-build. That anchor no longer exists, because the content moved to install_nightly.html.
8. C GLib: c_glib/doc/{arrow-glib,gandiva-glib}.toml.in set docs_url for Parquet GLib to .../c_glib/arrow-parquet-glib/ (404). The published path is .../c_glib/parquet-glib/.
9. Dead external links:
   • Numba CUDA docs (numba.pydata.org/numba-doc/latest/..., 404)
   • Jaeger docs/1.21/opentelemetry/ (redirects to a 404)
   • Wikipedia Quantile_rank (no such article), in the rank_quantile function doc in vector_rank.cc
10. Plain http:// links in several pages (ORC/Parquet/Hadoop/Hive/Drill/Impala/Spark, flatbuffers, nanoarrow, jemalloc, doxygen, sphinx, lz4). The old mail-archives.apache.org mailing-list archive link should point to lists.apache.org.

Needs investigation or a maintainer decision (not a simple link edit)

• Parts of the dev site appear stale. c_glib/index.html and r/index.html are Last-Modified 2026-08-12, and c_glib/arrow-glib/index.html is 2026-07-21, while the rest of the site is 2026-09-24. As a result, c_glib/index.html still has the old sidebar linking to python/parquet.html. The C GLib and R parts of the nightly dev-docs deploy may not be publishing.
• The sidebar/navbar "R" entry (implementations.rst hidden toctree) points to the stable R docs (https://arrow.apache.org/docs/r), while C++, C GLib and Python stay on dev. A toctree entry can't be a relative non-Sphinx path, so this needs a different approach.
• GLib macro pages (func.DEPRECATED_FOR.html and others, 7 libraries × 38 pages) link to c_glib/<lib>/version.h on GitHub. That file is generated by meson, and only version.h.in exists in the repo.
• c_glib/arrow-glib/alias.TimePoint.html links to a non-existent struct.TimePoint.html, because GArrowTimePoint is a typedef gint64.
• _modules/index.html lists 18 Cython modules (pyarrow/lib, _compute, _fs, …) whose viewcode pages don't exist.
• The viewcode backlinks in _modules/pyarrow/compute.html use #pyarrow.dataset.<fn> anchors that don't exist, for 7 functions re-exported in pyarrow.dataset.
• The R pkgdown site references favicon.svg, favicon-96x96.png and site.webmanifest (404 on 147 pages). r/pkgdown/favicon/ only has the older favicon set.
• Dev pages have about 70 absolute links to stable docs (/docs/...), and a few have hard-coded /docs/dev/... links. Many could be :ref:/:doc: or relative links.
• The implementations.html toctree and table use different URLs for Java, JavaScript, R, Rust and nanoarrow.
• These external links need a replacement chosen:
  • conbench.ursa.dev (DNS does not resolve)
  • the Intel SDLT page in format/Columnar.rst (404)
  • the two JIRA links in cpp/flight.rst
• A few developer-guide GitHub links are pinned to old commit SHAs, which is intentional for line ranges but may be outdated.

Links that looked broken but are fine: arrow.apache.org/swift/ (bot-blocked redirect), the Bluesky profile (SPA that returns a 404 status), reporter.apache.org (needs login), and the localhost examples.

Component(s)

Documentation