[Doc-SIG] Older Python Documentation

[Guido van Rossum]

> I'm working on a web site (http://www.webdocs.org) that hosts the
> current and older releases of the official Python documentation, along
> with some other Python-related docs.

Why bother?  Python.org has all previous doc releases back to 1.4:
http://www.python.org/doc/versions.html

> I currently have Python documentation from as far back as version 1.4 on
> the site, but nothing older.  If possible, I'd like to include as many
> releases of the Python documentation as I can find (if not all of them).
> However, I can't seem to find anything prior to Python 1.4.  (I did
> happen to find some tex files for a couple older versions, but no html
> files.)

Older releases didn't publish the HTML (you'd have to run latex2html
yourself).  Note that the most complete collection of Python
downloadables is at http://www.python.org/ftp/python/src/ -- the 1.2
and 1.3 source releases are there and they contain the .tex files.

> Also, I'm relatively new to Python (less than a year), so I don't even
> know which older versions were officially released.  For instance, I
> know that there was a version 1.3 and a 1.2 released, but was there ever
> a version 1.2.1 or 1.3.1?

If it's not at the URL I mentioned, it wasn't released.  (Except for
releases up to 1.0, which were lost.

> My guess is that no one today would even care about documentation from
> that far back.  But personally I think it's cool to be able to see how
> Python has evolved over the years.

Me too. :-)

You can see the history at the website here (there's a link to it from
the python.org home page):
http://web.archive.org/web/*sa_/http://www.python.org

--Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)