User manual vs web site - duplication?

I find the documentation frustrating for a number of reasons. One: you have this “User Manual” that you can download as a PDF; but it duplicates, sort of, the structure of the side bar on the web documentation: https://docs.gradle.org/current/userguide/userguide.html.

If they were exact copies, fine, but they’re not. I think it would be better to have one authoritative source of documentation. Pick one and delete the other.

They’re literally the same source, processed into multi-page HTML, single-page HTML, and PDF at build time. There are expected presentation differences given that the HTML page can be more dynamic than the fixed PDF, but the content should be the same. If you think you’ve found an example where something is not rendering correctly in one of the formats, open an issue with the specifics.

Okay, I see what you mean. Thanks for the response. Most of the actual content is the same. Now I see that, it’s not a problem, but for what it’s worth, I got confused because the headings in the web left nav are sometimes a bit different from the PDF, or in a different order. It gave me the impression I needed to read both to get all the info. For example…

  1. In web left nav you see: “Running Gradle Builds > Customizing Execution > Configuring the Build Environment”, while in the PDF TOC it’s “Running Gradle Builds > Build Environment”.
  2. “X” -> “Working with X” in one or the other. Eg, “X = Logging”.
  3. In the web, “Dependency Management” comes after the sections on JVM and C++/Swift builds, while in the PDF it’s before.
  4. A few things are skipped. Eg, I don’t see “leaning the basics > avoiding traps” in the PDF.