While I have no practical knowledge of how documentation is maintained in the spark project, I must agree with Nimrod. For users on older versions, having a programming guide that refers to features or API methods that does not exist in that version is confusing and detrimental.
Surely there must be a better way to allow updating documentation more often? Best Regards, Martin ________________________________ From: Nimrod Ofek <ofek.nim...@gmail.com> Sent: Wednesday, June 5, 2024 08:26 To: Neil Ramaswamy <n...@ramaswamy.org> Cc: Praveen Gattu <praveen.ga...@databricks.com.invalid>; dev <dev@spark.apache.org> Subject: Re: [DISCUSS] Versionless Spark Programming Guide Proposal EXTERNAL SENDER. Do not click links or open attachments unless you recognize the sender and know the content is safe. DO NOT provide your username or password. Hi Neil, While you wrote you don't mean the api docs (of course), the programming guides are also different between versions since features are being added, configs are being added/ removed/ changed, defaults are being changed etc. I know of "backport hell" - which is why I wrote that once a version is released it's freezed and the documentation will be updated for the new version only. I think of it as facing forward and keeping older versions but focusing on the new releases to keep the community updating. While spark has support window of 18 months until eol, we can have only 6 months support cycle until eol for documentation- there are no major security concerns for documentation... Nimrod בתאריך יום ד׳, 5 ביוני 2024, 08:28, מאת Neil Ramaswamy <n...@ramaswamy.org<mailto:n...@ramaswamy.org>>: Hi Nimrod, Quick clarification—my proposal will not touch API-specific documentation for the specific reasons you mentioned (signatures, behavior, etc.). It just aims to make the programming guides versionless. Programming guides should teach fundamentals of Spark, and the fundamentals of Spark should not change between releases. There are a few issues with updating documentation multiple times after Spark releases. First, fixes that apply to all existing versions' programming guides need backport PRs. For example, this change<https://github.com/apache/spark/pull/46797/files> applies to all the versions of the SS programming guide, but is likely to be fixed only in Spark 4.0. Additionally, any such update within a Spark release will require re-building the static sites in the spark repo, and copying those files to spark-website via a commit in spark-website. Making a typo fix like the one I linked would then require <number of versions we want to update> + 1 PRs, opposed to 1 PR in the versionless programming guide world. Neil On Tue, Jun 4, 2024 at 1:32 PM Nimrod Ofek <ofek.nim...@gmail.com<mailto:ofek.nim...@gmail.com>> wrote: Hi, While I think that the documentation needs a lot of improvement and important details are missing - and detaching the documentation from the main project can help iterating faster on documentation specific tasks, I don't think we can nor should move to versionless documentation. Documentation is version specific: parameters are added and removed, new features are added, behaviours sometimes change etc. I think the documentation should be version specific- but separate from spark release cadence - and can be updated multiple times after spark release. The way I see it is that the documentation should be updated only for the latest version and some time before a new release should be archived and the updated documentation should reflect the new version. Thanks, Nimrod בתאריך יום ג׳, 4 ביוני 2024, 18:34, מאת Praveen Gattu <praveen.ga...@databricks.com.invalid>: +1. This helps for greater velocity in improving docs. However, we might still need a way to provide version specific information isn't it, i.e. what features are available in which version etc. On Mon, Jun 3, 2024 at 3:08 PM Neil Ramaswamy <n...@ramaswamy.org<mailto:n...@ramaswamy.org>> wrote: Hi all, I've written up a proposal to migrate all the Apache Spark programming guides to be versionless. You can find the proposal here<https://docs.google.com/document/d/1OqeQ71zZleUa1XRZrtaPDFnJ-gVJdGM80o42yJVg9zg/>. Please leave comments, or reply in this DISCUSS thread. TLDR: by making the programming guides versionless, we can make updates to them whenever we'd like, instead of at the Spark release cadence. This increased update velocity will enable us to make gradual improvements, including breaking up the Structured Streaming programming guide into smaller sub-guides. The proposal does not break any existing URLs, and it does not affect our versioned API docs in any way. Thanks! Neil CONFIDENTIALITY NOTICE: This email message (and any attachment) is intended only for the individual or entity to which it is addressed. The information in this email is confidential and may contain information that is legally privileged or exempt from disclosure under applicable law. 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