Docs: dead source links in the state migration guide and the tracer pages

Open Beginner friendly
#7,591 0 comments 0 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub

Nobody has claimed this yet.

Assessment

Difficulty
2/5
Estimated time
1-3 hours
Newbie friendliness
68/100
Issue type
Documentation
Clarity
Mostly clear
Activity status
Active
Tech stack
rust, solidity
Domain
documentation

Research direction

Start with the cited lines in docs/docs/developers/guides/state_migration_guide.md, the three RPC and trace guide files, and the current Rust entry points in src/state_migration/mod.rs and src/state_manager/state_computation.rs. Confirm which migration entry point the sentence should name and verify the replacement source links and commit references through the contents API; done means the five Tracer.sol links resolve and the migration description matches the confirmed code location.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

Two broken source links in the docs, both verified against the contents API rather than a local checkout. Your AI policy says PRs may only target accepted issues, so I am asking first — happy to send the PR if you accept this.

1. docs/docs/developers/guides/state_migration_guide.md:195 links

github.com/ChainSafe/forest/blob/main/blockchain/state_manager/src/lib.rs

which 404s; that path predates the move to src/. The state manager is now src/state_manager/mod.rs.

The sentence is stale beyond the URL, though:

This is done in the handle_state_migrations method in the state manager.

handle_state_migrations does not appear anywhere in the tree — a code search finds it only in this doc. The current entry point looks like run_state_migrations, defined in src/state_migration/mod.rs and invoked from src/state_manager/state_computation.rs. I would rather you confirm which of those the sentence should name than guess, since it is describing where a migration gets hooked in at the right height.

2. Five links to Tracer.sol pinned at a commit that is not in the repository. All five use

blob/963237708137e9c7388c57eba39a2f8bf12ace74/src/tool/subcommands/api_cmd/contracts/tracer/Tracer.sol

and the API answers No commit found for SHA: 963237708137e9c7388c57e…. The file itself is fine on main (11,138 bytes), so the fix is just the ref. They are in:

  • docs/docs/users/knowledge_base/rpc/trace_call.md
  • docs/docs/users/knowledge_base/rpc/debug_trace_transaction.md
  • docs/docs/developers/guides/trace_call_guide.md

A pinned sha is the right instinct for a permalink, so if you would prefer a real commit rather than main, say which and I will use it.

Not touching: CHANGELOG.md:1280 links the old documentation/src/environment_variables.md, which also 404s, but rewriting historical changelog entries would falsify the record.

Everything else came back clean: the other external links in the 67 markdown files resolve, and the relative links inside docs/ that a naive check flags (../../reference/cli#…) are fine — docs/docs/users/reference/cli.md exists and Docusaurus resolves those.

AI disclosure: found with Claude Code (Claude Opus 5) sweeping the repo docs; I verified every path and the missing commit myself through the API before writing this, and trimmed it to the two things that actually need a decision.

Dominant language
Rust
Stars
699
Forks
200
Avg merge
1d 4h
Merged PRs (30d)
51

Contributor guide

Open the contributing guide

First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

More from ChainSafe/forest

All issues in ChainSafe/forest

Similar issues

More Rust issues

Get new issues in your inbox

A short digest of beginner-friendly GitHub issues.