[Doc-SIG] Older Python Documentation

[Tim Peters]

[Grant Harris]
> 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.

Cool!

> I currently have Python documentation from as far back as version 1.4 on
> the site, but nothing older.

I just did a Google search on

    "Python 1.3"

and one of the top hits was

    www.umich.edu/~archive/atari/Mint/Python/

from which you can get

    Python-1.3-docs.tar.gz

It matches my memory:  it's a bunch of .tex files, along with a makefile and
assorted scripts to generate other formats.

    http://ftp.fcaglp.unlp.edu.ar/pub/python/src/

appears to have a tarball for Python 1.2 too.

> 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.)

HTML was new-fangled stuff back then; Guido didn't have time to generate all
possible formats, unlike Fred today, who does nothing else <wink>.


> 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?

No.  You can extract a list of all historic releases from the file
Misc/HISTORY in the current Python source distribution.

> 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.

If you go back far enough, Guido used to maintain the docs in FrameMaker.
Good luck <wink>.