Shipped with old docs?

I just upgraded to 5 and noticed something odd.

I was starting to get into the EventSystem and did not know how to acquire the current EventSystem (other than via Find).
So, after googling I found the EventSystem.current static variable that gives back the current EventSystem.

So, the thing is, that this is in the documenation (even so in 460) BUT not in the shipped documentation at Unity/Documentation/ which is what I was using (I use Dash on Mac which is on 5 but doesnt show this method either).

So to make this clear: Either I'm stupid or you ship at least some parts of old documentation with Unity.

You can see that in the screenshots.

 

I'd log that in Unity using the Unity bug reporter using the category of "Documentation". Most likely just an oversight.

 

Thanks for the report but this is actually intentional. The online docs are now updated whenever we have new information worth showing. This means that the latest and greatest should usually be available online very quickly and users won't have to wait for a new release to see corrected or improved docs.

As it happens, for the 5.0 release, the docs changed quite a bit in between the final "freeze" for the installer build and the release date so you will find many differences between the online and offline docs. In case of doubt, the online docs are always intended to be definitive. To avoid the discrepancy being so large in future (and for other beneficial reasons), we will soon be making the offline docs available as a separate download. This will mean that you get the very latest offline docs when you download the editor installer and also, you will be able to refresh your offline copy to the latest if you so desire.

 

Wow okay.
While I can understand that while you develop the software further, you also want to provide the latest documentation for that, there a release circles for a reason.
So, you released 5.0 as a final version and don't bring with it the latest documentation? I mean, if that was a beta version I'd totally understand that, but if you ship a new revision what's the point of bundling it with a long obsolete docs version?
In the case of the EventSystem, this newer version was already included in 4.6.
If you release software to developers than don't bother to bundle it with an API documentation from yesteryear at all.

 

Ah, I see what you are referring to now. The EventSystem thing appears to be a glitch, actually - I'll investigate that.

I should reassure you that the plan of updating the docs online more frequently does not involve releasing completely out of date docs with the editor. Whatever is shipped with the editor *should* be valid at that point but we believe that publishing improvements between releases is definitely a good thing.

 

That's what I thought would be the case.

But I also thought that the version number in the docs URL corresponds the the respective release (e.g. http://docs.unity3d.com/500/ for version 5.0), but this doesn't seems to be the case. For example the shipped version totally misses the example code for "UI.Selectable.FindSelectableOnDown.html".

I can't express enough how frustrating it is to work with old docs.

 

As Andy says, the docs that are included with the installer were put together around 10 days before the release. The doc team (and dev teams) continued to work on the docs, and these have been shipped to the website regularly.

The live, most up to date docs are the ones on the website with no version number. The 500 docs were made available a long time ago for beta customers.

 

Look, my initial question was, whether you ship obsolete docs, because I noticed that the bundled version of EventSystem is even older not only than the current and bleeding edge website doc, but even older than your last major versions beta doc 4.6 here: http://docs.unity3d.com/460/Documentation/ScriptReference/EventSystems.EventSystem.html

So if you say, that you put together the docs 10 days before launching 5.0, something with your build system has to be faulty if this particular doc is alread around for far longer (since 4.6 beta probably).

Additionally, if the 500 docs were made available a "long time ago" I assume that this is far longer than 10 days before actual release. Which would lead me to the fact that those 500 docs should be included in the download. Which is at least partially not the case (as I mentioned in my earlier post).

Could you please address those discrepancies instead of reverting to say that everything online is new?

 

I'll get the infrastructure team to come here and explain what happened.

 

Hi @ruffyD,

I believe this is the same question as http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/5-0-api-documentation-incorrect-out-of-date.310024/, which was resolved last week.

So to answer your question, yes, the docs shipped with Unity 5.0 was unfortunately missing some 4.6 related changes. This is also surprising to me, as the scripting reference docs are branched with our code, and the fact that it wasn't found by either internal or external testing before release.

As said it has been updated in the online docs, and will be included in a Unity update soon. Hope this answers your questions.

Best regards, Rasmus

 

Alright, thank you for acknowledging and even more for fixing that.
Have a nice week.