Hi Neil,
While you wrote you don't mean the api docs (of course), the programming guides are also different between versions since features are being added, configs are being added/ removed/ changed, defaults are being changed etc. I know of "backport hell" - which is why I wrote that once a version is released it's freezed and the documentation will be updated for the new version only. I think of it as facing forward and keeping older versions but focusing on the new releases to keep the community updating. While spark has support window of 18 months until eol, we can have only 6 months support cycle until eol for documentation- there are no major security concerns for documentation... Nimrod בתאריך יום ד׳, 5 ביוני 2024, 08:28, מאת Neil Ramaswamy <n...@ramaswamy.org >: > Hi Nimrod, > > Quick clarification—my proposal will not touch API-specific documentation > for the specific reasons you mentioned (signatures, behavior, etc.). It > just aims to make the *programming guides *versionless. Programming > guides should teach fundamentals of Spark, and the fundamentals of Spark > should not change between releases. > > There are a few issues with updating documentation multiple times after > Spark releases. First, fixes that apply to all existing versions' > programming guides need backport PRs. For example, this change > <https://github.com/apache/spark/pull/46797/files> applies to all the > versions of the SS programming guide, but is likely to be fixed only in > Spark 4.0. Additionally, any such update within a Spark release will require > re-building the static sites in the spark repo, and copying those files to > spark-website via a commit in spark-website. Making a typo fix like the one > I linked would then require <number of versions we want to update> + 1 PRs, > opposed to 1 PR in the versionless programming guide world. > > Neil > > On Tue, Jun 4, 2024 at 1:32 PM Nimrod Ofek <ofek.nim...@gmail.com> wrote: > >> Hi, >> >> While I think that the documentation needs a lot of improvement and >> important details are missing - and detaching the documentation from the >> main project can help iterating faster on documentation specific tasks, I >> don't think we can nor should move to versionless documentation. >> >> Documentation is version specific: parameters are added and removed, new >> features are added, behaviours sometimes change etc. >> >> I think the documentation should be version specific- but separate from >> spark release cadence - and can be updated multiple times after spark >> release. >> The way I see it is that the documentation should be updated only for the >> latest version and some time before a new release should be archived and >> the updated documentation should reflect the new version. >> >> Thanks, >> Nimrod >> >> בתאריך יום ג׳, 4 ביוני 2024, 18:34, מאת Praveen Gattu >> <praveen.ga...@databricks.com.invalid>: >> >>> +1. This helps for greater velocity in improving docs. However, we might >>> still need a way to provide version specific information isn't it, i.e. >>> what features are available in which version etc. >>> >>> On Mon, Jun 3, 2024 at 3:08 PM Neil Ramaswamy <n...@ramaswamy.org> >>> wrote: >>> >>>> Hi all, >>>> >>>> I've written up a proposal to migrate all the Apache Spark programming >>>> guides to be versionless. You can find the proposal here >>>> <https://docs.google.com/document/d/1OqeQ71zZleUa1XRZrtaPDFnJ-gVJdGM80o42yJVg9zg/>. >>>> Please leave comments, or reply in this DISCUSS thread. >>>> >>>> TLDR: by making the programming guides versionless, we can make updates >>>> to them whenever we'd like, instead of at the Spark release cadence. This >>>> increased update velocity will enable us to make gradual improvements, >>>> including breaking up the Structured Streaming programming guide into >>>> smaller sub-guides. The proposal does not break *any *existing URLs, >>>> and it does not affect our versioned API docs in any way. >>>> >>>> Thanks! >>>> Neil >>>> >>>
