Documentation does not show when a feature was added
(1) By anonymous on 2020-09-25 02:22:05 [source]
I apologize for posting anonymously; I prefer that to creating an account that will likely be used only once.
A recent post asked when IFF was added, and I had a similar experience. I was attempting to write a query using INSERT FROM. Although I was following the sample code almost to the letter I kept getting syntax errors. It was only after an extremely frustrating hour of trying slightly different query formats, writing test SELECT queries using the pattern expected in FROM ( ... ) AS name and trying a similar query in MySQL (that worked) did it occur to me I should check the version of SQLite I was using.
I'm on Fedora 31 (no pressing need yet to update to 32.) It ships with 3.30.0 and was built less than a year ago. Imagine my astonishment when I discovered INSERT FROM was included only with the current release!
In my opinion, all new features should be tagged in the documentation with text such as as of version #.## released on date, and that text be kept there for a minimum of three years. Either that or organize the documentation by release version. Using one set of documentation tagged with release information would be easier to set up, aside from having to comb it every once in a while for old tags.
Spencer Jamison
spencer@groupbcl.ca
(2) By J. King (jking) on 2020-09-25 04:09:01 in reply to 1 [link] [source]
The SQLite documentation's primary audience is C programmers who will compile the library into their own program, or people otherwise using the latest version. If your distribution provides an older version, you should be consulting your distribution's documentation (sqlite-doc package for Fedora, I believe).
That said, the SQLite Web site does have a changelog that lists all notable feature additions over the last two decades. Searching that has usuall been fruitful for me.
(3) By David Raymond (dvdraymond) on 2020-09-25 12:35:29 in reply to 1 [link] [source]
On the downloads page there's a documentation zip file included in the list of available files. So if you want to have the documentation from a specific release you can go back and grab that file for the release you're using.
Of course... there doesn't seem to be a quick link to that, so you'd have to alter the url and rely on consistent naming, which isn't the optimal solution, but hey.
Looke like https://www.sqlite.org/<year of release>/sqlite-doc-<version number>.zip
There's probably a way to do it with fossil, but I'm not familiar with that.