Cheatsheet "version" parameter

[tpimh]

The cheatsheet link in "Help" menu opens the link with a "version" parameter (e.g. https://openscad.org/cheatsheet/index.html?version=2019.05), however this parameter is ignored, and the latest version of the document is always shown.

This can create some confusion. I also believe it would be beneficial to keep the historic versions of the cheatsheet accessible.

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[jordanbrown0]

Could we perhaps retrieve historical versions from github history?

[jordanbrown0]

Looks like github can indeed retrieve historical versions, but based on browser behavior it's probably retrieving them as text/plain rather than text/html. But maybe there's still an option there.

Note that if we were to go that way we'd probably want to branch at releases so that one could update a historical cheat sheet when appropriate. We'd then use the version parameter to pick the branch.

[tpimh]

Well, javascript is always an option, but I would prefer storing storing copies of the old versions of the cheatsheet in the main branch.

This way, it's possible to redirect the user to a static url based on the version parameter. For example, user visits https://openscad.org/cheatsheet/index.html?version=2019.05, script in "index.html" checks the version parameter value and compares against the value saved in "index.html" internally. The value 2021.01 != 2019.05, then redirect to "version.2019.05.html" (that file should also have a plaque indicating that the latest version is 2021.01).

[jordanbrown0]

You can grab an old version of a file from GitHub with a static URL. For instance, here's what looks like the 2019.05 cheat sheet: https://github.com/openscad/openscad.github.com/raw/fc1456ca9cf2382b3c536429a74e9c112b172adb/cheatsheet/index.html
You can also use a tag to specify, rather than the commit ID. (Maybe you need a different URL pattern.) The cheat sheet repository doesn't have any tags, so I can't use an example from there, but here's a historical version of one of the source files:
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/openscad/openscad/refs/tags/openscad-2021.01/CMakeLists.txt

One problem is that GitHub always serves it up as text/plain, instead of text/html.

From a management perspective, I'm not sure whether it's better to proliferate historical files in the repository, or rely on branches to issue new versions of old documents. For large-scale things, like maintaining "patch" releases of a previous full release, branches are the only way to go, but for single-file documents it might be simpler to just keep N copies of the file in parallel.