[CentOS-docs] Documentation SIG

[Tim Krupinski]

Thanks for the info.  I just checked Redhat's support site, and it 
appears the docs are licensed as such:

     This document is licensed by Red Hat under the Creative Commons 
Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License 
<http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/>. If you
     distribute this document, or a modified version of it, you must 
provide attribution to Red Hat, Inc. and provide a link to the
     original.     If the document is modified, all Red Hat trademarks 
must be removed.

Are you concerned with the amount of effort it would take to remove all 
of RedHat's trademarks if we were to modify it?  Either way, one of the 
first things I wanted to address wasn't necessarily adding more 
documentation, but starting a conversation about how it's currently 
organized on the wiki.

For example, on the Front Page, there are four different tabs that 
reference "Documentation" - Help, Tips & Tricks, How To, and FAQs.  It 
isn't very clear whether the FAQ is about the Wiki, or the project.  
Compare that to the Fedora Project wiki, where the front page has one 
pretty obvious link in the sidebar called 'Documentation'.  From there 
you can get the official manuals, information on the IRC channel, etc.

The other mild annoyance i've experienced with CentOS documentation is 
that i'm commonly linked to a section of an outdated version - like the 
other day when I searched for some X11 settings and was referred to 
Chapter 30 from the CentOS 4.5 manual.  Personally it's not a big deal 
because I know that this is still relevant.  But as a newcomer to either 
the Linux commnities or CentOS specifically, I would be wondering why I 
can't find up-to-date documents.

That being said, I suppose the next step is to find out how I should go 
from here.  Are there any sort of regular meetings?  What other 
collaboration tools are used?  If there's nothing formal maybe a 
conference call might prove useful.  I can set up a bridge line if 
people are interested in that.

Thanks again,

Tim

> Joe Brockmeier <mailto:jzb at redhat.com>
> March 13, 2014 at 8:00 AM
>
> Another thing to consider, and I don't know if I've seen elsewhere, is
> whether there'll be a 'standard' way to produce documentation for
> variants / anything produced by SIGs.
>
> Will that just go on the wiki? Should it be full-blown DocBook guides
> like the official upstream docs? Will every SIG just make that decision
> on their own? (In a perfect world, documentation for all variants would
> be similar and not a Frankenstein's monster mix of wiki, DocBook, or
> whatever else.)
>
> I guess the Xen4CentOS project would be the current poster child for
> variants? Looks like that documentation lives on the wiki:
>
> http://wiki.centos.org/Manuals/ReleaseNotes/Xen4-01
>
> Best,
>
> jzb
> Jim Perrin <mailto:jperrin at centos.org>
> March 13, 2014 at 7:12 AM
> On 03/12/2014 09:39 AM, Tim Krupinski wrote:
>> Hey all -
>>
>> Just curious to find out if there's any activity with the documentation
>> SIG?  I'd like to join.  One thing i've noticed is that it seems like
>> documentation for CentOS ends at 5.  While the documentation is more or
>> less mirrored from RedHat's site, this can be confusing to beginners since
>> they may get the impression that documentation isn't there.
>
> Most of the activity has been around things other than docs, but you do
> bring up a good point. We *need* to address this.
>
> With the 6.x documentation, there was a licensing change that
> complicates things for us. Changes to the documentation mean that you
> can't redistribute. Oracle appears to work around this by shipping the
> official pdf documentation.
>
> The web pages for the docs are also done slightly differently, and
> mirroring them would require editing the html. We're not certain if this
> constitutes a 'change' or not and have been focusing on other things
> (SIG, dojo efforts).
>
>> That being said, i would love to help out with bringing the wiki up to date
>> in this regard.
>
> This would be fantastic, and I would very much welcome your efforts.
>
>
>