Introduction

[Stuart Ellis]

On Mon, 24 Jan 2005 05:10:56 -0800, "Karsten Wade" <kwade at redhat.com>
said: 
> Seeing the tremendous effort that Stuart has put into the Installation
> Guide (IG), I realized that for the long term, we could use a small team
> (2 to 4) for the IG to:
> 
> 1) Work on new content/changes for upcoming releases, as soon as test1
> is out or sooner.
> 
> 2) Maintain the existing release, including bugfixes, content merges
> from the existing version to the upcoming version, and content merges
> coming the other way.

I came to the same conclusion - that multiple maintainers are a
necessity in the long term.  My reasons were slightly different, though:

1) Single point of failure.  ATM, whenever I'm ill, away etc. work stops
altogether.  

2) Fedora and Anaconda support a wider range of technology than a single
person is likely to have access to, or use.  I don't have any systems
that are 64-bit, include wireless etc., so I can't document those
features.  There are also some software technologies that I don't have
any experience of - Hesiod, software RAID setups etc.

So any help is good, even if people only fill in gaps.

> At the moment, I was hoping Stuart might have some small creation tasks
> for Mayank, that is, help in finishing something that is unfinished.
> This is outside of the scope of what Mayank is available for, so I don't
> know if it will work.

There are a number of areas where people can help, some small and other
large (there are several unwritten sections).  I'll post an update with
a TODO file tonight, so Mayank can have a look and decide which bits he
would feel comfortable tackling.

> FWIW, I have tried to respond to all requests for Fedora documentation
> with a polite request for more writers.  I think the FDP is a great
> place to get started for people who want to be more closely involved in
> open source development.  Feel free to make such pleas yourselves,
> wherever you can.  We can't be at fault for failing to create a tonne of
> documentation if the community hasn't first provided a tonne+1
> writers. :)

It may be that the project doesn't promote enough right now - I went
from toying with the idea of writing documentation to doing it through
going to an IRC "docs day" that was advertised on the main GNOME news
site.  The "GNOME Love" system is also an interesting model for
attracting and mentoring new contributors.  There are a number of
approaches, but it really depends on how you would like to develop the
project - you may only want the FDP to handle certain kinds of
documentation, or feel that you don't want to push too hard before CVS
is finalised.
--

Stuart Ellis
s.ellis at fastmail.co.uk