Getting started with documentation

Jonas Pasche mail at jonaspasche.de
Fri Jan 16 16:41:28 UTC 2004


Hi again,

and thanks Christian and Jesse for the warm welcome!

> I am not certain who you need to coordinate with to get setup for
> updating the site.  Talke with Jesse, and Eric Rostetter.

Okay, so let's start collecting information:

- Who has write access to the site / whom should I send new content?

- Who wants to help writing?

- Who wants to review content before publishing? Or would it be better
  to pre-publish content on my own site first and let it be reviewed by
  any list members who are willing to? From my point of view the process
  is more straightforward if there is only a small group who manages it,
  to avoid what I call the "wiki effect": A couple of pages, some very
  very detailed, some still to be written, some pages that are more a
  bookmark collection than written content, and everything in different
  writing styles and quality.

- To the webmaster: In what file format is new content expected - plain
  text? HTML? Or are these pages generated through some kind of CMS?

Regarding the content itself - from my point of view we need two parts
of documentation as a start:

1) End users: What is Fedora Legacy? What can I do to keep my system up
   to date? Where can I find security advisories? ...

   I think I can prepare this part well, because I know most things
   about it.

2) Developers: How can I participate? ...

   This part would be harder for me, because I'm not a developer.
   Besides that, package submission and QA mainly works as with regular
   Fedora extra packages (I think so?!), which are documented on the
   Wiki, however, in a very short form. For legacy packages, the process
   should be easier, because some parts (e.g. writing completely new
   %pre[un] and %post[un] scripts, package name choosing, desktop entry
   choosing) are simply not needed for legacy packages. Anyway, I need
   assistance with this part from somebody who knows this process very
   well to tell me what is needed and what isn't.

A word about participation in general: There is a short list on
fedoralegacy.org what can be done, but few information how the make the
first steps to actually start helping. In turn, there are quite a couple
of self introductions on the list, so there are people to do work, but
nothing has yet effectively led to officially published packages, so
obviously people are missing directions on what to do and how to it - or
am I missing another reason?

Based on this, we should also work on the "Participate" section, telling
a bit more than "We need every helping hand we can get" - maybe more in
the style of "We need somebody who regularly checks the Bugzilla LEGACY
queue, downloads packages and test if they build and install cleanly,
then giving feedback on Bugzilla. We need somebody who watches the Red
Hat Announcement list for updates that are important for Fedora Legacy,
does a quick analysis of the update and informs the people on what is to
be done", and so on. Meaning, more a kind of a job description, to allow
interested people to judge what they can to and what they can't. For
example, maybe I'd be technically able to "do QA" and simply don't know
it, because I don't know what exactly "doing QA" means, being confused
by 25 steps in 7 sections, just to mention the PackageSubmissionQAPolicy
document - and I'm sure I only have to do a few of them, regarding
legacy packages.

Jonas
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