Re: Contributing to the Debian Users' Manual
On Thu, 4 Jun 1998, Kenneth R. Kinder wrote:
>
> Regardless, I am <brag>a good technical writer</brag>, and would like to
> contribute my efforts to the Debian Users' Guide! Could you tell me
> what specificly I could document, and I'll tell you which ones I feel
> quilified to document?
>
> Specificly, I could document some common programs like vi (of which
> there is no docs in your users manual, and vi's docs aren't ideal for
> insertion into the manual), sed, ect...
>
> Any thoughts?
>
Great!
This is what's happening with the tutorial at this stage (there is also a
reference manual planned; I'm assuming you mean the tutorial which is on
my web site).
- I just finished the last graded work of my undergraduate career an hour
ago (yay me!) so I now have more time. One thing on my agenda is getting
together the materials to apply for an account on the Debian machines and
getting the docs in CVS there. For now, you can write and email your
creations to me.
- RMS is reading the manual, and will get back to me on possible
cooperation with the FSF, merging with their GNU/Linux Cookbook. This
would have the following implications:
- Using their docs license instead of the GPL
- All contributors would have to assign copyright to the FSF
- Writing in a more general way, though Debian specifics could be
included too
- The parts of the manual lifted from the LDP manual might have to go,
if Larry Greenfield is unwilling to assign copyright. AFAIK we haven't
asked him though. The LDP guide is GPL but doesn't use the FSF docs
copyright.
- The manual would be printed up and its sales would benefit the FSF.
This is the big advantage, aside from not duplicating effort. I'd like
to have a hard copy, and I bet others would too.
- There might be some conflict on DebianDoc vs. Texinfo - this is pure
speculation, RMS hasn't mentioned it.
Once RMS gets back to me, we will have to decide if we want to do this.
So that's what's going on, so you understand the bureaucratic situation.
;-) However, there's nothing to keep you from starting on sections of the
manual. Pretty much anything that's not there remains to be written. I
think there is a section on vi in the LDP user's guide; you might want to
grab this from the LDP directory on sunsite and see if it's usable before
writing your own. However, as I say it's possible that we won't be able to
use the LDP stuff.
Well, have a look at all the empty sections in the current manual, and see
if you can fill one in.
Thanks,
Havoc Pennington ==== http://pobox.com/~hp
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