On 8/26/07, Nicola Larosa <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Only if you make it so, and you shouldn't. :-)

So do you have a means of pushing out updated docs to everyone who's
downloaded a tarball, every time we make a change that's not related
to documenting a change in Django itself?

> It does not work. You cannot really get people to use the trunk docs, but
> in many places say: "Oh, by the way, this little thing changed, please
> refer to the *right* release docs, but do come back when you're done, thank
> you." again and again.

Which isn't really what anyone's trying, so that's a bit of a red
herring. The problem we've been having is people who download the 0.96
release and then try to follow the SVN version of the tutorial. This
simply will not work; there is no possibility of "do this part from
0.96 and then come back", because the SVN tutorial is going to use
techniques (max_length instead of maxlength, __unicode__ instead of
__str__, named URL patterns, etc.) which simply cannot be made to work
on 0.96 in any fashion.

Thus, the problem to solve here is simple: how do we ensure that
someone who downloads the 0.96 release uses the 0.96 version of the
documentation?

Bundling HTML versions of the docs isn't a solution, because (speaking
from experience of reading django-users and hanging out on IRC) many
users never realize that the documentation is bundled with the
download in *any* format (just as many users probably never realize
that they get a free copy of "Dive Into Python" on most Debian-based
Linux distributions, and so ask where they can find a good Python
tutorial online). These are the same users who never find their way to
the release-specific docs on the website.

Which is why it's been proposed that the default landing page for the
documentation should be the version for the latest release of Django,
not the SVN docs; this would solve the problem of people downloading
the release tarball (or installing a package on a Linux distro -- the
distros track releases, not SVN) and ending up at the SVN docs.

> They shouldn't have to go the web site: the release docs should be on their
> disk, within the installed release itself (see my other message).

See above. I'm sure you mean well, but the experience of seeing people
actually work with Django and its documentation is against you on that
point.


-- 
"Bureaucrat Conrad, you are technically correct -- the best kind of correct."

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