Develop doc helper for upgrades across many versions
(This request describes a pipe dream. Of course there are various intermediate levels which are also useful even without full coverage.)
Description
Use-case: People upgrading from arbitrarily old version want to know what changed:
- Configuration grammar
- Defaults
- Behavior
We have people upgrading from ancient versions, and going through all the release notes is pain for everyone involved, especially if something changed repeated in meanwhile.
Request
Ultimately, an ability to "diff" grammar, defaults, and preferably also notes about changes between versions (= unicorns and rainbow).
To do that, we need:
-
programmatic access to grammar - available in doc/misc/parsegrammar.py -
programmatic access to defaults - parser producing machine-readable output is missing -
rst directive .. versionchanged:: versionnumber
in the ARM describing when we changed behavior and how (Sphinx docs
With that in place we should be able to pick two versions and generate "diff" in terms of added/removed/deprecated configuration statements, changed defaults, and notes pointing to feature changes.