Craig R. McClanahan wrote:
>
> On Mon, 9 Jul 2001, Alex Chaffee wrote:
>
>
>>>Bundle the 3.2.x docs with 3.2.x and only have the 3.3 docs online ("latest
>>>Tomcat release"). If you want the 3.2.x docs, get them with the binary or
>>>whatever. I certainly don't think we should keep old versions of
>>>documentation updated. I mean, why would updated 3.0 or 3.1 docs be useful?
>>>
>>>
>
> Unless and until there's a 3.3 or 4.0 final release, *3.2* is the "latest
> Tomcat release", and deserves to be documented on the web site.
OK, but my point is that as we improve the 3.x docs -- regardless of the
value of x -- the 3.2 docs will become less relevant.
Right now there are many differences between the 3.2 and 3.3 docs, but
they're mostly in the connector docs, which AFAIK haven't changed much if at
all in operation. This leads me to conclude that the docs in the 3.3 tree
are just as valid when applied to 3.2, except that they're better docs,
since more people have had a chance to revise them. That's why I'd like to
remove the "Tomcat 3 docs that happened to be in the depot at the time 3.2
shipped" in favor of "the latest version of the Tomcat 3 docs (which happen
to be in the 3.3 dev tree)".
Perhaps the easiest way to do this would be with a separate depot. I'm
shying away from that for the reasons you (Craig) brought up. It's nice for
docs to be in the same depot as the code...
> There's no reason to banish the current Tomcat released version, or any
> other version that is being actively developed. And it's quite easy to
> arrange the user interface so that it's obvious which version you are
> looking at (for example, including "Tomcat X.Y" in the header or footer of
> the pages about that version).
Again, apart from 3 vs 4, the difference between versions 3.2 and 3.3 is
small, as far as docs are concerned, so announcing "Tomcat 3.2" in the
header wouldn't be very salient, and would just promote forking of docs. We
seem to be in this quandary because the docs have not really been part of
the release process -- they get released slapdash relative to the code
milestones.
By the way, it seems like the majority of the existing documentation is
about installation. If there were a clean, robust install script, it would
remove 90% of the text on the site. Maybe before we write (rewrite) install
docs we should write an install script. I know that was on your todo list
for 4 -- how's that coming?
--
Alex Chaffee mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
jGuru - Java News and FAQs http://www.jguru.com/alex/
Creator of Gamelan http://www.gamelan.com/
Founder of Purple Technology http://www.purpletech.com/
Curator of Stinky Art Collective http://www.stinky.com/
