Re: Hurd documentation roadmap
Gordon Matzigkeit wrote:
> MP> - who maintains the Hurd pages on the GNU website?
>
> Those pages were originally written by Trent Fisher, then modified by
> various GNU people when they moved to www.gnu.org. Then I updated
> them with the information that I had as of last July or so. Since
> then, I haven't really ``maintained'' them, but I touched them last.
>
> Basically anybody with accounts on www.gnu.org has permission to
> modify web pages, at their discretion. Of course, it's best to talk
> with other people before doing something singlehandedly. I created
> that set of pages, then asked for comments before replacing the old
> ones.
It would be good to have a repository for Hurd documentation and a maintainer(s)
to coordinate changes. There are several items in this area: 1) web pages, 2)
FAQs, 3) HOWTOs, 4) reference manuals. I don't believe that there's currently
one place to go to find all of these other than the list archives. One should be
able to find all this via http://www.gnu.org/software/hurd/hurd.html. I want to
add all of these to the FAQ, but they don't all exist on 24/7 accessible machines
or aren't in the best format (the latter won't stop me from publishing threads of
broad interest). I would pull them all to my server, but my bandwidth is severly
limited.
What I would like is to collect everything into a repository on my machine (or
some other) and then have it mirrored to say
http://www.gnu.org/software/hurd/documentation. I'm not stuck on any particular
mechanism for doing this. Something like a weekly tarball or wget. This could
be designed to become /usr/doc (or the like) in the Hurd distributions.
I've copied this to the GNU webmasters. What do you guys think about the above.
What would need to be put in place/approved/etc. to do so?
If on my machine, I'll most likely put everything under CVS for colaboration and
grant access to those who need it or accept diffs/new doc. versions from the
maintainers of the documents in the set. At this point, I would add a document
index to the Hurd FAQ as well as index.html to the directory as a rallying point
for all documentation.
> MP> - should we say "Hurd" or "the Hurd"?
>
> This is a great question for the GNU Hurd FAQ. ;)
Yep, it's goin' in...
> MP> - what do you think about seperating an "installation manual"
> MP> from the "Hurd reference manual"?
>
> Yes, that's a good idea. Distribution-specific installation manuals
> will have to be separate from the generic reference manual. However,
> like all GNU software, we also want to have complete documentation for
> the Hurd itself available in the Hurd tarball.
I beg of you to PLEASE focus on installation instructions. This is no small task
as the Hurd is not very mature in this area. I'd love to see something like
http://www.debian.org/2.0/install.html for the Hurd. There are already a handful
of documents that cover the basics, but not one that brings it all together
(someone please correct me if I'm wrong). Basically, the easier it is to
install, the more it will be perused by interested parties.
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