Fedora 7 installation guide and release notes

[Rahul Sundaram]

Hi

When are these getting published? It would make it easier to link to if 
they were published a bit earlier to the actual release. Is there any 
other documents waiting to be published on the pipeline?

What's the status on the updated Fedora user guide. I still need to 
update the software management guide which is hopefully done soon.

It might be useful to link to all the relevant user specific docs esp 
ones focusing on Fedora 7 prominently from http://docs.fedoraproject.org

There was a short document on burning images, virt guide in 
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Docs/Fedora7VirtQuickStart and possibly 
others.

Rahul

[Karsten Wade]

On Thu, 2007-05-31 at 03:58 +0530, Rahul Sundaram wrote:
> Hi
>
> When are these getting published? It would make it easier to link to if 
> they were published a bit earlier to the actual release. Is there any 
> other documents waiting to be published on the pipeline?

Continual balance of resources and effort.

Both have a schedule and some fairly obvious reasons for that:

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/DocsProject/Schedule#relnotes-schedule
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/DocsProject/Schedule#guides-schedule

For the release notes, we wait until the last possible moments to merge
content from the Wiki.  This is part of the promise made to provide
latest content.

For the Installation Guide and other guides, you'll note in the schedule
that PO files were due for guides yesterday.  This is part of the
promise made to translators to give them long enough to translate.

In this release, we took advantage of the extra time we had to get
additional content included for translation and inclusion in the ISO.

Finally, the release notes are modified at the last minute to contain
the release name, which is traditionally kept "secret" until the release
is made official.
> What's the status on the updated Fedora user guide. I still need to 
> update the software management guide which is hopefully done soon.

You might have missed the proposal made on this list a few weeks ago.

A group of us in a FDSCo meeting (including UG and AG contributors) felt
that we could merge the SMG content into the UG and AG.  All of the
user-oriented content goes into the UG, and any special repo making
content goes into the AG.

So, the content still needs updating with each release, but the title
would go away, merged into two others.

What think ye?
> It might be useful to link to all the relevant user specific docs esp 
> ones focusing on Fedora 7 prominently from http://docs.fedoraproject.org
>
> There was a short document on burning images,

http://docs.fedoraproject.org/readme-burning-isos/ ?

I changed the link on the page to read "Making (Burning) Fedora Discs"
> virt guide in 
> http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Docs/Fedora7VirtQuickStart and possibly 
> others.

Ah, hmm, yes.

Keep the suggestions coming for user-specific docs.  Although we want to
produce a Fedora Live CD/Images Guide, we need to link to the current
content for now.  I'll push some of that up tonight.

- Karsten

[Jonathan Roberts]

> A group of us in a FDSCo meeting (including UG and AG contributors) felt
> that we could merge the SMG content into the UG and AG.  All of the
> user-oriented content goes into the UG, and any special repo making
> content goes into the AG.

I just started moving over the Pup and Pirut guides from the SMG to
the UG. One thing struck me though: some points in the SMG don't
really fall in the UG or the AG, such as Software Management Concepts.
Maybe the SMG still needs to hang around in some form or another to
cater for these bits?

Jon

[Paul W. Frields]

On Thu, 2007-05-31 at 13:06 +0100, Jonathan Roberts wrote:
> > A group of us in a FDSCo meeting (including UG and AG contributors) felt
> > that we could merge the SMG content into the UG and AG.  All of the
> > user-oriented content goes into the UG, and any special repo making
> > content goes into the AG.
>
> I just started moving over the Pup and Pirut guides from the SMG to
> the UG. One thing struck me though: some points in the SMG don't
> really fall in the UG or the AG, such as Software Management Concepts.
> Maybe the SMG still needs to hang around in some form or another to
> cater for these bits?

This merits some discussion, definitely.  I originally edited this guide
-- some time ago -- and have (I hope) gained a little bit better vantage
point in the intervening time.  The way I see it, the concepts outlined
here are too advanced for new users, especially converts from other
platforms.  The purpose of the User Guide, especially, is not to Teach
You All About Linux/Fedora/Packages/Whatever; it is to show you how to
accomplish some common tasks.  Those tasks should definitely include
updating the software on your machine, since it means inheriting
bugfixes and security patches.  The user needn't understand concepts of
software management or packaging to accomplish that task.

The Administrators Guide, however, is a great place to *repeat* the
content on "how" and then, additionally, *include* the content on "why."
System administrators *should* know these concepts, since they affect
the provision of services to users.  So include them there, and a note
in the UG can easily direct rabidly curious or otherwise advanced users
to the AG.