[libvirt] ANNOUNCE: Starting a libvirt application developer guide effort

Daniel P. Berrange berrange at redhat.com
Wed Dec 16 13:05:15 UTC 2009


This is a quick mail to announce that we have started an effort to write
a libvirt application developer guide. The guide is intended to introduce
programmers to the libvirt API and its concepts and demonstrate best
practice along the way. The initial focus is on the C API, but once that's
matured, further info on language bindings can be added.

As is common with all work done in the libvirt project, the guide is being
made available under an open license, specifically the

  Creative Commons Attribution–Share Alike 3.0 Unported license ("CC-BY-SA")

The reason for this choice is that it has become the defacto license choice
for documentation under Fedora, GNOME, and content from Wikipedia, etc.[1]

The application developer guide is written in DocBook and is processed using
the Publican toolset to generate the HTML and PDF output. Again this choice 
was made because it is the same toolset used in Fedora & Red Hat docs

NB, this is using Publican 1.x series of releases which is available starting
in Fedora 12 or later. The build config/styling is not compatible with the
older Public 0.x series from earlier Fedora.

There are two new GIT repositories for this work

 - A repository containing the libvirt brand. This is essentially CSS and
   graphics required to make the docs use the same style as the libvirt
   website does

      http://libvirt.org/git/?p=libvirt-publican.git

 - A repository containing the application developer doc. This is the
   actual interesting content. 

      http://libvirt.org/git/?p=libvirt-appdev-guide.git


Assuming you have Publican >= 1.0 installed, then the first step is to
build and install the libvirt brand. This involves getting a checkout of
the libvirt-publican.git repo, typing 'make rpm' and then installing the
RPM it generates. 

Once the brand is installed, then you can get a checkout of the actual
docs from 'libvirt-appdev-guide.git'. The content is all under the 
directory en-US/ in docbook format. To generate html, from the top level
directory just type 'make html', likewise pdfs with 'make pdf'. If you
just type 'make' you get html and pdfs. 

I have put up example copies generated from current available content

  http://berrange.fedorapeople.org/libvirt/appdev-guide/html/
  http://berrange.fedorapeople.org/libvirt/appdev-guide/pdf/

If you look at these, you'll notice of course that while there is a nice
big table of contents, most of the actual content is missing. We are 
continuing to write content and will update it periodically. If anyone is
interested in contributing content, then simply send patches against the
docbook XML in the libvirt-appdev-guide.git to this list as per the normal
review & commit process.

Regards,
Daniel

[1] http://iquaid.org/2009/07/06/why-relicense-fedora-documentation-and-wiki-content/
-- 
|: Red Hat, Engineering, London   -o-   http://people.redhat.com/berrange/ :|
|: http://libvirt.org  -o-  http://virt-manager.org  -o-  http://ovirt.org :|
|: http://autobuild.org       -o-         http://search.cpan.org/~danberr/ :|
|: GnuPG: 7D3B9505  -o-  F3C9 553F A1DA 4AC2 5648 23C1 B3DF F742 7D3B 9505 :|




More information about the libvir-list mailing list