[wildfly-dev] One Doc to Rule Them All

[Jason T. Greene]

Just as a general note, no matter how we generate our documentation we can always qualify versions. For example we can say "Since version X.y, blah". 

In general software tends to be additive until you hit a major rearchitecture. Currently I think we are forking the documentation too much. 

> On May 12, 2016, at 10:33 PM, James Perkins <jperkins at redhat.com> wrote:
> 
> I've been reading the WildFly documentation [1] quite a bit lately and noticing a lot of issues. Sometimes it references WildFly 8 in the WildFly 10 (or 9) documentation. Sometimes it references JBoss AS 7. Links take you to old documentation, e.g. a WFLY10 doc takes you to a page for WFLY8. Sometimes documentation is just plain out of date referencing behavior that has possibly been removed or replaced by something better.
> 
> This has happened because we keep copying the documentation over each time we have a new version. Overall this makes sense as a lot of it doesn't need to be changed. However it leaves reading the documentation confusing. Reading documentation for WildFly 10 and seeing WildFly 8 in the text with a link for AS72 isn't very user friendly as I'm sure we can all agree.
> 
> There's a few different ways we could go with this.
> 
> Approach 1:
> One, probably the easiest, is to use a single confluence project. We'd need to remove the version numbers from the text, which I think we should do anyway. Instead of referencing WildFly 10 we just reference it as WildFly.
> 
> An issue I can think of with this approach is some how annotating or referencing that parts of the documentation only work with ${version}. For example new features would have to be noted they only work with ${version}+.
> 
> 
> Approach 2:
> Essentially he same as approach 1 only do allow different Confluence projects for the different Java EE target version. So WIldFly 8, 9 and 10 would all be documented under something like WFLYEE7.
> 
> Approach 3
> Switch to using something like asciidoc which can use variables and generate links to the correct content. While this approach is probably takes the most work up front, it seems like like it would be easier to maintain between releases.
> 
> Any other suggestions are welcome.
> 
> [1]: https://docs.jboss.org/author/display/WFLY10/Documentation
> 
> -- 
> James R. Perkins
> JBoss by Red Hat
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