About versioning Spring docs

[kantorn]

First of all: Spring is great! Sometimes I hardly can believe the things you can do, and I'm amazed that EJB still is "out there" (for other reasons than big finacial systems). I'm one of the guys that has spent days and maybe weeks of my life cursing over and not just grasping why all this code was really necessary. And to be honest, I've never really understood how it works, but don't tell anyone, I'm supposed to.

The Spring documentation is also very good, and has undergone a significant expantion the last month. I regularly print it, and therefore have a little wish:

Would it be possible to mark every version with more than just Spring version? As it is a "work in progress" it would be most useful if the docs would be marked with last changed date or some revision code. Then one would know if there is a need to print a new copy of it.

Thank you!

[Colin Sampaleanu]

We've typically be updating the online docs to match the release candidates, and sometimes even CVS.

I do think that it is somewhat confusing for people to know what version is being referred to, so we probably need to link to both the docs for the current released version, and the CVS version.

W/regards to updating some sort of small version number on every change, this is a bit harder, because the docs is built automatically from a number of source XML files, and people can go in there at any time and change anything from 1 line in one file, to a bunch of stuff in mutliple chapters. So a version number doesn't really do justice to these 2 extremes.

[kantorn]

Hi, Colin.

I understand. I'm not a regular CVS visitor myself, but often stick to the versions published on the site, so I probably has no need to know whenever single-line updates of the docs have occurred.

In the future maybe the engine that compiles the docs from all these sources could put a small timestamp somewhere, on the first page or so? That would be a very convenient feature.

Thank you!