Hi everyone, We are (as our RMs recently announced) not very far from the next Debian release (4.0) which probably means that many maintainers might have stalled some development and are sitting on their packages, trying not do very important changes (such as new upstream releases) that might introduce transition problems and hinder the eventual freeze and release. Right? ;-) So, if you are looking for something to do that might actually help the next release (besides testing the latest d-i, fixing RC bugs and doing NMUs) I bring you one right to your lap: improve our documentation by helping update The Debian GNU/Linux FAQ. FYI HTML, Text and PDF versions are shipped in the CDs/DVDs as separate elements (in a subdir) to make them easier to read them before people even install the distribution, they are also available in the ftp mirrors [1] and, of course, the web pages [2]. So the FAQ might be one of the first documents people might turn to even if they do not know zip about Debian. The FAQ is currently translated to nine languages: Brazilian Portuguese, Chinese, French, German, Italian, Polish, Russian, Spanish, and Ukranian (although not all of them are up-to-date) However, the FAQ is not being as updated as it should be, the people that have put some work on it (Jost van Baal, Jens Seidel and myself) are working in many other Debian things too, some content is available under the wiki [3] but still has to be reviewed and rewritten for the FAQ, user-driven contributions to the FAQ are not outstanding (at least based on the bug reports [4]). Some content might even be out-of-date and needs rewording or needs to be removed from the FAQ since it does no longer apply. So, I would ask you maintainers to take a look at the current FAQ, check if the "frequently asked questions" the Debian users you know make are up there or not and, if they are not, submit bug reports (preferrably with patches to the current SGML sources) to improve the FAQ in time for the next release. Even if you do not have time to write a patch but can still review the current contents please send a suggestion of pending information to add it to the TODOs [5] so that we don't miss it. CVS sources are available at the Debian Documentation Project repo [6] and is also browsable online at http://cvs.debian.org/ddp/manuals.sgml/faq/?root=debian-doc Thanks! Javier [1] ftp://ftp.debian.org/debian/doc/FAQ [2] http://www.us.debian.org/doc/user-manuals#faq [3] http://wiki.debian.org/FAQs BTW, for those in favour of the wiki (vs. "official documentation") I suggest you look at the bottom page of some of the FAQ items there and see how up-to-date and community driven they really are. No need to start-up a flame war about this however :) [4] http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?pkg=doc-debian;dist=unstable [5] http://cvs.debian.org/ddp/manuals.sgml/faq/TODO?&root=debian-doc&view=markup [6] http://www.debian.org/doc/cvs
Attachment:
signature.asc
Description: Digital signature