Re: Maintaining PHP 5 documentation

On 04.12.2020 at 22:05, Anna Filina wrote:

> Hm, I don't think that it would allow us to do things like clean the legacy
> docs of unnecessary references to newer behavior or fix pre-existing issues
> in the legacy docs. Since major versions coexist for a time, I assume
> there's no clean cutoff point in the revisions. Here's my vision of the
> docs. Let me know what you like and what you don't, and propose
> alternatives.
>
> - Current manual located at /manual/en. Only currently supported versions
> of PHP are referenced here, with links to legacy docs.
> - Legacy docs located at /manual/php5/en. Only PHP 5.x versions are
> references, with links to other legacy versions and/or the current version.
> <-- I can find resources/financing to manage the legacy docs, including
> hosting.
>
> I'm trying to find a solution that is both good for the devs but also
> requires no ongoing effort from the docs team.

I think we could create a php5 branch of
<http://svn.php.net/viewvc/phpdoc/> (cut off from an earlier revision,
before we started to remove the PHP 5 specific info), which could be
maintained mostly independ from the trunk, but where relevant commits to
trunk could be merged in (and maybe some of the commits to that php5
branch could be merged into trunk).  That would certainly be cleaner
with Git, but should work with SVN as well; I'm not sure if there would
be issues with the SVN to Git bridge, though (likely not).

Anyhow, this branch would only need doc-base/ and en/ (unless you'd want
to maintain translations as well).

Then we would need supporting infrastructure to regularly roll new php5
doc builds, and to deploy these to the Web server.  And all the gory
"details" ...

If you are not accustomed to the doc maintaince process, maybe you want
to explore a local test setup[1] (something like en@r350642,
doc-base@r350511 and phd@7624cce), so you can estimate the maintainance
effort (sans infrastructure setup and maintainance).

[1] <http://doc.php.net/tutorial/local-setup.php>

Regards,
Christoph