add release date / runs to documentation

[unusualevent]

It would be great to know the dates that a model was in production.

For example, when were Lemur Pro v9, 10, 11, etc being sold?

I can guestimate based on git history but that's not very accurate or official, e.g. bc92954

[jacobgkau]

This might be feasible. Some complications:

• For some models, orders are taken a few days before e.g. firmware development is finished. For other models, development is finished but the start of sales waits a few days to fit into the marketing schedule better. Do we list the date it was announced, the date it was first sold, or the date it was approved to ship?
• Especially for laptops, the "end" of a model's run is usually just when we run out and our upstream suppliers don't plan to ship us any more. If a customer makes a return after we stop selling an item, we might put it back up for sale, as a regular listing (after manufacturer restoration) or on the specials page. This sometimes happens even with products a generation or two behind, so it can greatly increase the overlap between "production" dates (on top of some products like the Oryx, Meerkat, and many Thelios where we've sold two generations at once as separate options for many months at a time.)
• For desktops, there are major revisions with a new motherboard/firmware (e.g. thelio-r1 to thelio-r2) and minor chassis revisions (e.g. thelio-r1.1 to thelio-r1.2.) We usually don't make a new tech docs section for minor chassis revisions, but for some sections in the past, we named them with the full version number used for photos. We'd have to make sure the wording is clear about which version number the run dates apply to.