Expose the documentation for older versions

[webpack-bot]

With four versions of webpack alive and kicking on tens of thousands -if not more- production instances, it would be incredibly valuable to have a way to quick get to the documentation for whatever modern or ancient version of webpack developers are faced with. Currently the webpack docs seem to only cover the most recent version, but the olds docs hopefully still exist somewhere... if so, can the documentation site be updated so that there's a version infix like https://webpack.js.org/4.10/, https://webpack.js.org/1.8, https://webpack.js.org/stable, etc. much like how readthedocs.io allows concurrent version documentation to be online?

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This issue was moved from webpack/webpack#7736 by @montogeek. Original issue was by @Pomax.

[EugeneHlushko]

This is duplicate of #1854, worth keeping separately? @montogeek

P.S. i know he mentions all old versions, but that is the solution we are aiming for in #1854 anyway

[montogeek]

We can only support v3 and forwards.

[Pomax]

This is not about which version you actively support - this is purely about having the old documentation online for consultation. Put all the old versions up with a banner "this is for a deprecated version of webpack, please click here for the current version's documentation", never, ever update them going forward, and you're good to go: people who are getting hired today and are hitting webpack 1/2 setups are currently in way more trouble than they need to be because the docs aren't really anywhere to be found (other than odd websites that don't seem affiliated with webpack at all. So, perfect potential-malware sites).

You could even set up archived repos for them; copy the site repo to webpack/v1docs from the very last v1 docs tag with gh-pages turned on (do the same for 2, etc) and send people to https://webpack.github.io/v1docs, after making sure issues, wiki, etc. are turned off for those repos, so people don't bother you with abandoned-version-related questions.

The important thing is that those docs stay on the internet for at least several more years until either everyone's moved off of webpack 1/2, or we're so far into the future that they literally no longer matter. We're not at that second point yet, it's only been less than 3 years since v1, and less than 2 since v2 - production codebases in small to medium orgs (especially internal project/product codebases) can easily turn over slower than that, and people who get roped into uplifting (or sometimes, maintaining O_o) those codebases really do deserve having the old docs available so they can figure what the heck these ancient setups are even doing =)

[montogeek]

We are working on it, in the future you could select which version in the website, similar to lodash docs.
Sadly, this is something that wasn't thought back in the day.
We can offer v3, v4 and v4, for webpack v1 or v2 you could use http://webpack.github.io/.

[kasjerJanusz]

Anything changed in the matter?