tags 283521 - patch severity 283521 wishlist thanks > Request and proposed patch from Geert to link directly to the Installation > Guide from one of the x86 syslinux help screens. > Some discussion, see BR for details.
I have looked at this request a few times in the past and even started work on a patch at least once, but got stuck for the following reason. The installer is built and uploaded when the next release is not stable yet. Even more, most of the uploads are never intended to go to stable. So a link to releases/stable would definitely not be correct. And thinking even further along: when stable becomes oldstable, the link to releases/stable would again be incorrect. This means that the patch proposed by Geert is just not acceptable: pointing people to the wrong version of the manual is just not a good idea at any time. Any solution to this would have to be able to stand the test of time. For beta releases the link should be to the development version of the manual on alioth. For RC releases you could expect the manual for the next release (say lenny) to be available from the website. So for those a link to http://www.debian.org/releases/_$codename_/installmanual could be considered. This would IMO solve all theoretical objections. Remain some practical issues. * The above means that the correct link would have to be dynamically included _at build time_. This should be possible. * The next issue is that we currently don't really have a way to distinguish between beta and RC releases, so it would be up to the RM to remember to switch to the correct link. * The last issue is that derived distro's or custom builds will probably want either a different link or no link at all. The simplest solution to this would be including the URL in config/common and not including the text (short sentence about the manual + the URL) if it is empty. This would give sufficient flexibility. Remains the burden on the RM to remember to set the correct link. Cheers, FJP
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