Documentation without dates

[Doug G]

A Pet Peeve of mine ..

Google searches often turns up promising looking tech documentation, but then after investing a few minutes reading it you realize there is no date on the document, and you're left wondering if you just wasted your time studying obsolete or outdated stuff.

[glennzo]

+1 on that.

[nonamedotc]

Oh yes. I made that mistake recently - I did not stop to think how recent the documents were and tried quite a few things - none of which worked. Turned out, most of things in the said source is no longer applicable!

[smr54]

Usually, depending upon the topic, I click the more tools option and look for things no more than a year old.

[marko]

Originally Posted by Doug G

A Pet Peeve of mine ..

Google searches often turns up promising looking tech documentation, but then after investing a few minutes reading it you realize there is no date on the document, and you're left wondering if you just wasted your time studying obsolete or outdated stuff.

If it's html, some times you can use "view source" to view embedded dates in the comments. But lots of times the writer doesn't put in good comments. In the case of pdfs, I look in the pdf's properties for the creation/modification data stamp.

[Doug G]

So tonite I found out about chrony on f16, so I went to the chrony home page. Looks like it's from the 1990's, not a date to be found on the home page. Am I wasting my time reading this stuff or did google help me find an obsolete page? After drilling down a couple levels I finally found a dated page letting me know this was in fact current information.

Most CMS and document publishing systems automatically date stamp pages, it's like these linux (mostly) documentation writers (I use the term loosely) go out of their way to remove any reference of when they wrote something. My gess is they do this so no one will know the docs are outdated and they won't have to work on them again

[marriedto51]

Originally Posted by Doug G

it's like these linux (mostly) documentation writers (I use the term loosely) go out of their way to remove any reference of when they wrote something. My gess is they do this so no one will know the docs are outdated and they won't have to work on them again

Don't forget that documentation is a programmer's absolute favourite activity... (Cue bad puns like "let sleeping docs lie" or "it's a doc's life".)

I like smr54's tip above (search for pages no more than a year old) -- thanks for that.