Versioned docs

[Simon Steinbeiß]

Hey everyone,

since the release date is creeping up on us, I quickly want to highlight a feature libxfce4ui has gained during this cycle and that is support for versioned docs. What this means is that if a user clicks "Help" in your app/component they will be redirected to the corresponding version of the docs online. This will help us account for differences without abandoning previous documentation.

Two parts of core already use this for a while – xfdesktop4.11 and xfce4-power-manager1.4 – so you can test those to see how things should work. I pushed support for this to xfce4-settings as well [1], as there are some quite visible and drastic changes e.g. in xfce4-display-settings that warrant a doc refresh.

From my point of view, all of our components should support this. Of course, this initially means that if you wanna do a major version bump, the Help button will point to a non-existing page in the docs-wiki. However, the simple fix is to copy-paste the content of older docs over and then to incrementally improve/adjust those to fit the new version. (Obviously using less screenshots makes this process less laborious.)

Anyway, it's fairly easy to add this in, so please go ahead and ahead of 4.12. While this means that until the release, the Help links will point to the void of a non-existing 4.11 page, it might be a good incentive for people to help us with documentation ;)

Cheers
Simon


PS: Another procedural remark: the main page of the docs should always point to the latest stable version of the component, so until 4.12 is released, http://docs.xfce.org/xfce/xfdesktop/start should point to the 4.10 docs. After the 4.12 release, that page should be moved to http://docs.xfce.org/xfce/xfdesktop/4.10/start to make space for the refreshed docs.


[1] http://git.xfce.org/xfce/xfce4-settings/commit/?id=ca5c4aed4525c12935a8e61dbb0f2e0509e50c6a