Re: One Manual per MySQL Version: What do you think?

[Bill Karwin]

Hi Stefan!

I have been a Tech Writing Manager in the past, so I can understand the desire for simpler, cleaner documentation. This usually makes it more clear. However, recently I do a lot of support on the forums and newsgroups, and I find that it is very useful to have details about different MySQL versions documented in one page.

I think it also is useful to anyone who is migrating a database from one version to another as they upgrade. It is difficult to learn about functional differences by reading the change history, because the history is orderd chronologically, not by functionality.

My preference would be that each page have information about the current version, but when there is a functional difference between versions, the details be moved to the bottom of the page with a subheading of "Differences in Previous Releases" or something like that. There you can state differences in simple bullet items, such as, "Multi-table UPDATE syntax is not implemented prior to MySQL 4.0.4."

I can also imagine that it is a tedious maintenance issue when a doc correction must be applied to multiple versions of the docs.

Perhaps the exception is that releases still in pre-release, like 5.1 right now, should be maintained separately until they are released. That way you only need to duplicate changes to two doc sets.

Regards,
Bill K.