[CentOS-promo] Recap of web+docs meetup at FOSDEM

Tue Feb 28 17:25:05 UTC 2023
Shaun McCance <shaunm at redhat.com>

Hi folks,

We had a web+docs meetup the day after FOSDEM. There were 10 or so
people in the room, and we talked about a variety of topics around our
web sites and docs. It was just a planning/discussion session, not a
working session. This is a recap of our conversations.


= Wiki

The wiki is running on outdated, unmaintained software on a version of
CentOS that will go EOL next year. It's a constant pain for infra, and
most of the content isn't being kept up to date. We will decommission
it. A large part of the rest of what we talked about has to do with
what to do with content that is currently on the wiki.

Fabian has already opened a conversation about this on centos-devel.

Davide has already done work on creating a static export of the wiki so
we can keep content around as long as it's needed.

I'll be going over all the wiki content to see what should move where,
or what should just be deleted.


= SIGs

SIGs can already publish docs on sigs.centos.org with mkdocs. People
seem happy with this. Having to maintain SIG info also in the wiki is
not good. We would like to make sigs.centos.org list all SIGs with
relevant information. I already have a data file with a bunch of info I
use to keep track of SIGs, so we may be able to build from something
like that. It would be nice to get some design help.

SIGs are encourages to write additional SIG documentation using the
mkdocs system we have now. But all SIGs would have their basic info
listed on sigs.centos.org, regardless of whether they produce docs on
that site.


= Docs

There has been work inside Red Hat to upstream much of the RHEL docs to
CentOS. This work is ongoing, but it will require the community to do
work around conditionalizing content to make it appropriate for CentOS.
I've talked about this before, including in my talk at the Dojo last
August. I agreed to write a document explaining how to do this, which I
haven't done yet.

There are also docs that wouldn't come from RHEL, like the contributors
guide. These would likely have to be produced with a different build
system. People seem happy with mkdocs for SIGs, so maybe that's the
answer. We also want to enable more short-form quick docs. Can those
use the same system? I hope so.

Regardless, given multiple sets of docs, it would be good to have
docs.centos.org be a definitive list of them, regardless of where or
how they're published. 


= Events

We use the wiki to list events, both things we host, and things we have
a presence at. We also recently created connect.centos.org, as the main
page for CentOS Connect. Davide proposed setting up events.centos.org
with the same sort of listing we have in the wiki now. We would keep
connect.centos.org, but each Connect's site would be archived to the
events site, along with non-Connect events. As always, we could use
design help.


= Forums

forums.centos.org is also running on a version of CentOS that will go
EOL next year. Something has to happen. There's interest in moving to
Discourse. Currently, we have a CentOS category on Fedora Discourse.
Should we set up our own? Would mailing list conversation move there,
or would it be just user forums? How active will it actually be? Lots
of questions. Needs followup.


--
Shaun