It would be nice if there would be a way to check out documentation of previous HA releases (e.g. to find out correct yaml configuration formatting before breaking changes)
There is a way to see older information but it requires a bit of navigation through Github.
At the bottom of every documentation page is an Edit link. It leads to Home Assistant’s Github repository for documentation.
On the top right of the linked page there’s a History link. It leads to yet another page summarizing all the changes.
For example, here’s the History page for the MQTT Sensor documentation:.
There was a change (Pull Request) done on September 26. If you click its link it displays the old information in red and the new information in green.
NOTE
On the History page, next to each Pull Request, there’s this icon:
It shows the document as it appeared at the time the change was implemented (“View at this point in the history”). However, in practice, I find the text’s appearance isn’t always formatted properly.
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This can be fixed but idk if it’s worth the effort in practice most of the time. The readme of the repo describes how to build a local preview of the site. So you could clone it, reset the whole repo to a commit in the past, build the preview and then see the entire website at that point in time, correctly formatted.
Yeah, but it would be nice to have at least tags for every release - this should be pretty easy to add and would massively help in both searching GitHub history and local deployment of specified version.
I think it would be really nice for Home Assistant to ship with the documentation for its current version baked in. That way, there is always a self-hosted/lical copy of the docs for that exact version.
I think an issue there is, the docs are not currently strongly versioned along with the codebase, so it tends to lag a bit. But it might still be good enough.
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