FDSCo Mtg / User Guide Update

[Matthew Daniels]

About two weeks ago, I had mentioned trying to finally finish the F9  
UG but that there were some chapters that I wasn't in the position to  
fact check.  I think Karsten's suggestion that we publish a guide  
without these chapters (those chapters being on KDE and Xfce) actually  
had some merit (1), so that's the plan I'm going with right now.

 From that same email (1) we had also talked about the guys at SCaLE  
working on the F10 update with me over VOIP.  That should still be  
able to work out, and I'm thinking we can take a giant chunk out of  
the F10 version of the UG.  If that goes as well as I envision it to,  
I think we could say that the F10 guide should be ready by mid March.

As we move up the revisions, Elizabeth Ann and I had set plans to  
overhaul a few chapters at a time.  The chapters don't need  
overhauling because they aren't understandable, but we're aiming to  
make the instructions to the user and the style in which they are  
presented uniform and more easily accessible as a reference guide (as  
opposed to a novel read front to back); in other words, we want to  
make any block of text try to be as understandable as possible with  
the user having to visit the smallest number of other pages as possible.

Another thing we had mentioned in the past was dumping the wiki and  
writing straight to XML (2).  I'm still a proponent of this, but I  
think it's more important to at least get up to date (F11) before we  
worry about changing that.  And when/if we do change it, I think we  
need to carefully look at how we can still make this document easy to  
access for new contributers.

Anyway, since "User Guide Update" or something to that effect was on  
today's Agenda, and since I'm always half an hour late for these FDSCo  
meetings, I wanted to send this out ahead of time.  If we do get to  
this in the meeting, please wait for me. :-)

-Matthew

References:
[1] https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-docs-list/2009-January/msg00223.html
[2] https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-docs-list/2009-January/msg00061.html