By chance I had a conversation with someone experienced in organizing documentation for software
products later today and he recommends to follow a pragmatic approach. The documentation should
always represent the latest development version and features should simply be marked with the
version of their introduction. In case of changes to previous behaviour old and new behaviour should
be documented, again with a note when the changes were introduced. Everything more complicated like
managing a n-version documentation is likely to need a lot of rules and discipline and is therefore
likely to not being successful.
This is more or less what I proposed in the last approach except that it isn't coupled to a change
in our release process. Do you think this would be feasible?
Uli
On 01.06.2010 12:49, Ulrich Stärk wrote:
With the upcoming switch from maven-generated documentation to
documentation kept in confluence we should discuss how we will organize
the documentation in the future, especially with respect to versioning.
Currently all work on Tapestry is done in trunk with some fixes being
backported to the 5.1 tag, including documentation. This means that we
have several completely independent versions of the documentation that
can be generated on request. If we want to keep it that way, we will
have to somehow artificially version our documentation pages in
confluence. E.g. with a parent page "Documentation" and subpages for
each Tapestry version like "Tapestry 5.1", "Tapestry 5.0" and "Tapestry
dev" which themselves again contain independent pages for the different
topics like cookbook, user guide, tutorial, etc.
Another approach could be that we only have the most current
documentation in confluence and whenever a release is published, we
export the documentation to html and store it somewhere alongside the
release. This would have the advantage that we don't have to manage
several versions of the documentation but it would also mean that we
can't easily amend the documentation of the released version once work
on the development version has progressed.
A third approach could be a mix of the two where we only have the
documentation for the current release and for the current development
version in confluence.
A yet another, more radical approach could come hand in hand with a
change of how we develop and release Tapestry. Instead of working
towards a fixed set of functionality and release when it's done (which
might take some time) we could begin releasing at a fixed interval, say
every two or three months. That way the current release version and the
current development version wouldn't drift apart that much concerning
documentation and possibly long-awaited new features. That way it might
be enough to just have one version of the documentation and mark
features not yet in the release version as such.
There are possibly many other possibilities that I didn't think of and
I'd like to discuss these. What do you think? Have you any other
suggestions how to solve this versioning problem?
Cheers,
Uli
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