Why is there no mention of contrib.layers.linear in the Tensorflow documentation?

Question

I'm trying to understand someone else's simple tensorflow model and they make use of contrib.layers.linear.

However I cannot find any information on this anywhere and it's not mentioned in the tensorflow documentation.

Answer 1

The tf.contrib.layers module has API documentation here. As you observed in your answer, the contrib APIs in TensorFlow are (especially) subject to change. The tf.contrib.layers.linear() function appears to have been removed, but you can use tf.contrib.layers.fully_connected(…, activation_fn=None) to achieve the same effect.

Answer 2

I managed to find the answer and felt it was still worth posting this to save others wasting their time.

"In general, tf.contrib contains contributed code. It is meant to contain features and contributions that eventually should get merged into core TensorFlow, but whose interfaces may still change, or which require some testing to see whether they can find broader acceptance.

Code in tf.contrib isn't supported by the Tensorflow team. It is included in the hope that it is helpful, but it might change or be removed at any time; there are no guarantees." source