Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System

I'm wondering if there is a way to refer to the latest version of our
documentation like the Application Developer's Guide or the Channel
Access Reference manual. I'm looking for a URL that contains something
like "latest" instead of a specific version number. Is there something
like that?

The problem with asking for the “latest version” is that our older doc’s have always been version-specific, so you can’t identify functionality that was added to Base-3.15.6 in the Base-3.16.2 documentation even though the same functionality was merged up from the 3.15 branch into 3.16. We have rarely if ever identified what got added when, although some of the newer PVA module doc’s may do that now. That means even if you ask for the “latest for the 3.15 branch”, you can’t tell from the text whether specific features in it apply to the version of Base you’re using.

The AppDevGuide is being phased out. Branches of it still exist for 3.15 and 3.16, although these haven’t been updated for a while (the last changes were merged in October 2018), but there is no 7.0 branch. We have been working to move the texts worth saving into other places; the libCom APIs to Doxygen annotations that will appear on the 7.0 branch in due course, and some of the other chapters have been converted to pages on https://docs.epics-controls.org/en/latest/ (there’s a “latest” link for you) and linked from the epics-controls.org website.

The Channel Access Reference Manual comes with Base, and we rarely add features to CA anyway so it doesn’t get changed much.

Record reference documentation has been converted from the old Wiki pages and integrated into Base itself so your build generates its own HTML for them; I just added the dbCommon documentation and remaining record types that Rolf Keitel developed at the Codeathon in March, and those can now be found from the APS 3.15.7 release webpage.

Sorry if this doesn’t help, the docs.epics-controls.org link above is probably the best bet for the future, but may not be comprehensive as I don’t think we have plans to install or link to the files from the base/html directories there (I may be wrong about that though).

- Andrew