RE: Please post older versions of GNU Emacs manuals on the web

[Drew Adams <drew.adams@oracle.com>]

> > If you have a version of GNU Emacs older than 24.4 then you are lucky to
> > still have `defadvice' documented in the Elisp manual.
> 
> Maybe we should have a "deprecated features" manual, where text gets moved
> after it is removed from the Elisp manual? Even though 25.1 may not use
> defadvice, it still allows such code to be written, which means you'll
> probably run across such code in the future and would like to read
> documentation on how it works.
> 
> I can understand taking it out of the manual, but it would be nice to have
> another manual for "features you may well run into in the wild, though you
> shouldn't write new code this way". I'm not proposing maintaining such a
> manual actively, but just copying deprecated sections like the "defadvice"
> content directly into it instead of deletion.

I'm not against our doing what you suggest (as I say, IMO the `defadvice'
doc should never have been removed from the manual, at least as long as
it is still supported (while deprecated)).

But what I propose is different.  And unlike what you suggest it should
require no extra effort, beyond the one-time effort of building the
HTML doc, which should not be a big deal.

My proposal is for GNU Emacs to post the complete Emacs and Elisp
manuals for older versions.  We could even add a command similar to
what I posted here, which takes the current release into account
when determining the URL.