fedora documentation question/clarification

[Edward C. Bailey]

Hello,

    I'm not speaking on behalf of the Docs project maintainer, but since
she's not chimed in, I'll see if I can shed some light...

>>>>> "Gene" == Gene C <czar at czarc.net> writes:

Gene> When Red Hat marketed their Red Hat Linux product, one of the
Gene> characteristics was that a set of manuals was included (hardcopy if
Gene> you purchased the product and cdrom iso if you downloaded).  From
Gene> what I can see of Fedora Core, these manuals will not exist anymore
Gene> (although I assume that they will be available for RHEL).

Gene> True?  False?

    That's true -- the old Red Hat Linux manuals are not going to be
available for Fedora.  http://fedora.redhat.com/projects/docs/ has
information on how the documentation aspect of the Fedora project will be
run.

Gene> Is there (or will there be) any effort (perhaps with non red Hat
Gene> folks) to update these manuals as Fedora evolves.

    I don't think this would be a good use of project resources for at
least two reasons:

    1. The manuals are not licensed in a manner that would be compatible
       with the project (Check out an HTML version of a Red Hat Linux
       manual, and follow the "Copyright" link for more information).

    2. The sources are not available (due to the license terms referred to
       in point #1).

Another thing to keep in mind is that Fedora Core is going to be moving
quite rapidly; keeping entire manuals up-to-date wrt the software would be
a massive undertaking.  That's a primary reason why the Docs project is
going to focus on a cluster of article-sized documents, versus a few (much
larger) manuals.

    All this said, the best place to take documentation-related
conversations  is over to fedora-docs-list...

                                Ed
-- 
Ed Bailey        Red Hat, Inc.          http://www.redhat.com/