localize multiple versions of Electron

[zeke]

Companion website issue: electron/electronjs.org-old#797

Here's what lives in electron/i18n today:

• tutorial docs (/docs/tutorial/**/*) from electron/electron#master
• Electron API docs from whatever is currently latest on npm, i.e. "stable"

Eventually we'd like to localize multiple versions of Electron's docs, so website visitors can choose the version of Electron they're using and have that choice persist as they browse the site.

Having a smaller number of Electron versions to support would make things easier. Easier for Electron engineers, easier for our translators, easier for the computers that are already crunching nearly 4000 markdown files per i18n build (1 electron version * 150 markdown files * 25 target languages).

Electron does not yet have an EOL policy for older versions. Until such time, we can draw our own line in the sand. Perhaps we could start with the modest goal of targeting the latest patch-level versions of each existing minor, e.g.:

• v1.6.17
• v1.7.13
• v1.8.4
• v2.0.0-beta.5

[FranzDeCopenhague]

Documenting and localizing each Electron version will be useful for the users, but also the change history in the API like Node.js does:

[zeke]

The nodejs/i18n Working Group has converged on a pattern for managing multiple versions of Node.js: nodejs/i18n#83

It looks like this:

$ tree content -d -L 2

├── v10.x
│   └── en-US
├── v6.x
│   └── en-US
├── v8.x
│   └── en-US
└── v9.x
    └── en-US

This could be a good pattern for Electron. It would look like this:

$ tree content -d -L 2

├── v1.x
│   └── en-US
├── v2.x
│   └── en-US
└── v3.x
    └── en-US