Apple recently "archived" the vast majority of their developer library documentation. Their new dev doc library is available as a docset named 'Apple API Reference' for easy/offline reference in Dash.app. but I couldn't find any user-contributed docsets that included even a subset of the guides in apple's developer.apple.com/library/archive/.
That's too bad, because while many of the documents in the archived library are 5-10 years old, there are also a bunch of documents in the 'Guides' category that are still very relevant and more recent. apple.developer.library.archived.guides.txt
is a listing of 26 guides about MacOs data structures, internals, APIs, file system, and other architecture details that are both still recent and also more broadly educational about their topics than the "updated" guides in the new developer library, which generally provide minimal background and focus primarily on specific API methods and parameters. So these old guides are still pretty handy I think.
I found a now-broken go script by @RoCry (attached below, also at https://gist.github.com/RoCry/9657004) written to fetch pdf versions from the old archive. This seemed like a good starting point for figuring out how to automate the creation of a Dash docset for some the apple dev archive. The URL patterns used in @RoCry's script are out of date now that the library has been archived, but it turns out the JSON manifest are still available just at a new location. Unfortunately, the pdf href for each "book" that used to be in the manifest files no longer is present.
But with the updated json manifest scheme and @RoCry's script as a starting point, and the list URLs to still-relevant Guides below, it shouldn't be too difficult to automate the creation of a dash docset for part of the apple developer library archive.
Here are the updated urls for the library.json manifest and an individual book manifest:
curl https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/navigation/library.json > .doc/developer.apple.com.archive.library.json
curl https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/FileManagement/Conceptual/FileSystemProgrammingGuide/book.json > developer.apple.com.archive.library.FileSystemProgrammingGuide.book.json
@100ideas is it somehow possible to still download new and old version of Apple documentation?