Status of Fedora docs

[Karsten Wade]

On Tue, 2005-03-08 at 18:26 -0500, Elliot Lee wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> I'm just learning about this corner of the Fedora world. :-) I'm wondering
> what you Fedora documenters have been working on, who's involved, what the
> frustrations are, and what plans you'd like to turn into reality. I did
> notice Stuart's work on the Fedora Install Guide - very cool - and no
> doubt there is a lot of other work that needs recognition and integration.
> 
> Thanks for your efforts - how can I help with them?

Got a few hours?  Hee hee.  I'll try to be brief.

Our biggest challenge is that we started with no documentation
(practically), and it is difficult to write everything from scratch.
We're working on this.

One elephant-in-the-room is the release notes.  Currently these are
being handled by John Ha, technical lead of the docs team at RH, but
these really should be a community effort.  We need to do some serious
thinking about how this could be done modularly by the Fedora developers
with docs help.  A Wiki that gets contributed to as we go, edited by
this group, and dumped to plain XML for the install?

Another challenge is the toolchain has problems with PDF output.  This
is something we are working on internally on the RH docs team, but I
would love to see this handled via the community.  If we identify fop as
the processor of choice, we will need to get it compiled using gcj and
someone will need to maintain the package for Fedora.

The docs we are working on are primarily how-to/tutorial types.  This is
mainly because it's a PITA to maintain a full length guide by yourself,
especially if you aren't being paid for your (significant) time.  We
have been trying to be creative with modularizing docs such as the
Installation Guide, so multiple people can write and maintain it.  This
is still in the baby-steps stage.

When we have access to the docs CVS for outside contributors, there are
a few that are ready to put their stuff in CVS.  We have discussed this
off-list, so I'm just adding this as an item.

Is that enough to chew on for now?  I'm sure I'll think of more later.

I'm always camped on #fedora-docs on irc.freenode.net, if anyone wants
to discuss this further that way; I'll report anything useful back to
the list.

BTW, I think I'm done with all the craziness for a while, so am again
gung-ho for solving our problems and moving forward with our plans.
Thanks, Elliot, for dropping in to help.

- Karsten
-- 
Karsten Wade, RHCE * Sr. Tech Writer * http://people.redhat.com/kwade/
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