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Emacs manuals (such as the Emacs Lisp Reference Manual are provided at a .../emacs/manual/<manual-name>.html URL. Surprisingly, the version number that the manual applies to is not part of the URL.

As I understand it, Emacs-specific manuals are versioned alongside Emacs itself (e.g. there is an Emacs Lisp Reference Manual for Emacs 24.5, one for Emacs 25.0, etc.). Where can older manuals be found? The Emacs download mirror contains a single Emacs Lisp reference from 2002.

I think it'd be a good idea for the .../emacs/manual/<manual-name>.html site to always refer to the newest manual, but for older version to be available at ...emacs/<version-number>/manual/<manual-name>.html.

JeanPierre
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Tianxiang Xiong
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    The idea has already been suggested in http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2016-01/msg00079.html and people agree with it. We just need someone to do it. – xuchunyang Apr 18 '16 at 07:26
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    I agree, but... Are you looking for arbitrary older manuals, or just the manual for the version(s) of Emacs that you're actually using? Because you already have the latter available inside Emacs (and the indexed & searchable info manuals are considerably better than the html versions). – phils Apr 18 '16 at 11:22
  • Yeah...I know the manual is available through Emacs (and is especially convenient to use through a tool like [helm-info](https://github.com/emacs-helm/helm/blob/master/helm-info.el)), but I still find myself reaching for the web version. Info files are great, but not for long stretches of reading. – Tianxiang Xiong Apr 18 '16 at 12:06

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I'm not aware of any official archive. Some very old versions (up to 21.2) are in the old-gnu directory.

Most versions since 21.4 (as well as a few older ones) are availble in the Debian snapshot archive, in the package emacsNN-non-dfsg (22, 23, 24, 25). The file emacsNN-non-dsfg_VERSION.orig.tar.gz contains the sources, and the file emacsNN-non-dsfg_VERSION_all.deb contains the info file.

Not all systems support deb files out of the box. They can be extracted on Debian and derivatives with dpkg -L …. In Emacs, you can open them with deb-view.el from the Debian emacs-goodies compilation. On a Unix command line, use ar p ….deb data.tar.xz | xzcat | tar -xf - (replace .tar.xz | xzcat by .tar.gz | zcat for older versions) (ar is part of the binutils collection).

Gilles 'SO- stop being evil'
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