On 18 Jan 2022 19:27, Karl Berry wrote: > Having multiple versions of the manual online sounds all to the good to > me. As long as it's being done at all, I wouldn't hesitate to put up > the manuals for every release, not just the major releases. For 1.16.x, > I'm afraid I rather broke the previous rules for major releases anyway. > > https://www.gnu.org/savannah-checkouts/gnu/autoconf/manual/autoconf-<VER>/ > > What I don't like about this approach is that it redirects from the > generic url to the versioned url. Also, the /savannah-checkouts/ seems > pretty ugly. > > I think it would be cleaner to create and commit > <www>/automake/manual-<ver>/<files> for whatever <ver>s desired. > Could probably get them out of CVS. > > Then automake/manual/<files> could remain unchanged, as a copy of the > current <ver>. FWIW ... --best, karl.
i agree that automake/manual/ should be canonical and the main entry point to the documentation. what should that page look like ? i see two ways: * the GCC method where it's a quick index of every version. great for referencing, but i think might put too much emphasis on multiversion. * the current page, but with an entry/link like "For older manuals, please see this index." and that takes you to the full version index akin to what GCC is using. this does a good job of steering people into the latest version without them thinking about it. in terms of layout after that, i'm of two minds. on one hand, i agree that it's kind of ugly that you're always redirected to the versioned one, and there's never a canonical manual/<foo> base. but on the other, if people are copying & pasting links to the manual, everytime we make changes to the manual the rename or reorder chapters, we're breaking those historical links. if it always redirected to a versioned URL, people would be more likely to copy & paste links that are stable. so i would lean towards everything being anchored/entered here: https://www.gnu.org/software/automake/manual/ we'd have the curated landing page & full versioned index in there. the versions would be subdirs rather than parallel so as to keep the higher automake/ dir a bit tidy. so: https://www.gnu.org/software/automake/manual/1.15/ https://www.gnu.org/software/automake/manual/1.16/ (or if you prefer, 1.15.x and such) any other manual/<file> access would redirect to the latest version. that way we don't break links already out in the wild. -mike
signature.asc
Description: PGP signature