Bug#251813: Sarge install manual not available in an obvious place

[John Gilmore <gnu@toad.com>]

Package: debian-installer-manual
Version: sarge

The web pages at www.debian.org have links along the left margin for
"Documentation".  Unfortunately, all those links lead to "stable" rather
than "testing" documentation, with no option provided to get to the
"testing" documents.

If you actually want people to test your "testing" release, then I suggest
the home page should point people to it.

If I go via the nonobvious route of following the "Read more about
available versions of Debian" link on the home page, then I get a link
for "testing".  This is a general release information page, and provides
no information about how to try downloading or installing it, and no
link to the installation manual.

So I tried going to the "stable" documentation and then manually
replacing "stable" or "woody" in the URL with "testing" or "sarge".
This didn't work either.  It produced:

  http://www.debian.org/releases/sarge/installmanual

but this web page does not exist.  I suggest that it should -- at least
if you hope that people will try to install your Testing release!

Instead, the pages appear (according to replies I got to an earlier bug
report) to be maintained over here:

  http://d-i.alioth.debian.org/manual/

which is a totally non-obvious place for new Debian users.

It was rumored to me that these non-obvious manuals are rebuilt daily,
but there is no way to tell, since the manuals do not appear to have
any timestamp information in them.  Nor do they say what versions of
the software (besides the nebulous "3.0+omega") they are documenting.
They certainly have no 2004 copyright notices.

Given that the "testing" release CD gets rebuilt weekly, perhaps
having the manual describe "which weekly CD build it was last purported
to document" would be a good thing.

	John Gilmore