FWIW I believe that keeping around old sites is useful, but only if there's a banner that says "this is out of date, please use the newest version" with a link to the new version. The reason for keeping them around is that sometimes you are stuck on an older version, so you need that archived documentation(since it is possible that some behavior has changed between versions, and/or a newer API that you want to use is not available with your version).
-Robert Middleton On Wed, Feb 7, 2024 at 5:29 AM Piotr P. Karwasz <piotr.karw...@gmail.com> wrote: > > Hi Volkan, > > On Wed, 7 Feb 2024 at 11:05, Volkan Yazıcı <vol...@yazi.ci> wrote: > > I can see the use cases for wanting to keep the website+manual of every > > single release in a dedicated directory. Though my counter arguments are: > > > > 1. These pages were never officially linked, hence were not exposed to > > users. What is the pressing need right now to make this happen? > > 2. They get search engines confused and cause users to end up in legacy > > pages. > > 3. The infrastructure to realize this (putting each release to a > > separate site branch) is cumbersome, difficult to navigate for > > developers, > > deviates from the standard the rest of our websites follow, and hence > > complicates the release process substantially. > > 4. We (almost) never break backward compatibility in a major release > > line. Hence, the docs of `2.x` is a superset of the docs of, say, > > `2.22.0`. > > We also always document newly added features as "Starting from version > > `2.22.0`, ..." Given these, I don't see a compelling point of having a > > separate website for `2.22.0`. > > I might add that documentation is never bug-free and I consider the > documentation of a release as important as the release itself. > > Since the only maintained releases are 2.22.x and 3.x (and perhaps > 2.3.x and 2.12.x for security updates), I don't see a reason to > publish the documentation of anything else than those releases. > > BTW: we should add a banner to the 1.x, extras, 2.3.x and 2.12.x > websites that states that they refer to archived software that reached > EOL. > > Piotr
