Hi,
On 1/12/2006 10:25 PM, Andrew Ford wrote:
I thought I'd better raise my hand here. As you know I hacked away at
the Bacula documentation back in September but have been rather quiet
since (I have been rushed off my feet with consultancy, preparing
company accounts, and selling rights to a cookery book we published and
hacking on latex to RTF conversion). I would like to pick up the Bacula
documentation cleanup again but I am not sure how much time I can devote
to it; moreover I don't know that I would really classify myself as an
expert when it comes to Bacula, or to backups generally.
As long as you are an expert in writing - especially the part of it
where you structure your works - that's ok. After all, most of the
_information_ already exists in the manual or the knowledge of these
mailing lists.
As I see it there are several strands to the issue of documentation. It
sounds like there will be a chapter on Bacula in Curtis Preston's
O'Reilly book, which is great but that almost certainly won't really be
enough to act as proper documentation.
I suspect that, too. This chapter could, in my opinion, be practically
identical to the part of the Bacula manual called "Overview and
comparison with other backup programs" (to be written...)
The current documentation is
(aside from formatting concerns) in a bit of a mess. It looks like it
has acreted material over time and it could do with a major overhaul (I
get worried when bullet lists have more than ten items, but some like
the feature lists have dozens). The could well be structured into a
number of sections (some which could stand as separate documents):
overview, getting started, day-to-day usage, configuration, installation
(as an appendix), and also quick reference material. Most of these
sections already exist in the documentation, but not in a sensible
order, and as the manual I'm looking at has over 50 chapters, the
chapters should be separated into parts.
Yes.
As I say I would be happy to contribute to the documentation effort, but
I don't know that I could play a lead role. I had wondered about
writing a book myself but I don't know whether I know enough about
Bacula and I don't know whether there is the potential market to make
the reward of author royalties worth the effort involved -- just
reworking the existing documentation looks to me like a major undertaking.
Quite true, I think.
Maybe what is needed is a separate documentation mailing list to gather
together the interested parties and then to draw up a strategy for the
documentation as a sub-project.
Why not? As long as you can make sure that a number of people with good
knowledge about how Bacula works take part in it - perfect.
The first thing to discuss, considering the astonishing number of people
who want to contribute to writing books, would be something more or less
purely administrative.
That question would be which projects actually happen, and who'd be
responsible for them.
(
My suggestion would be to let you, Andrew, work on the manual overhaul.
It might be a good idea to collectively produce some sort of overview
and a schedule, so that smaller parts could be handled by other people.
As I suggested above, a part "Overview and Comparison" might become the
chapter in the planned O'Reilly book.
Finally, someone - Adam? - with large-scale backup and Bacula experience
might lead an effort to write a dedicated Bacula book, which could
hopefully make good use of a reworked manual.
Then, one very important question: As there would be only a limited
number of project leaders (aka authors, for the publishers :-) who would
probably rely on the free help from many others it should be considered
how any earnings in the end would be shared. My idea, if I decided to
support the people who do the actual writing, would be that I would
claim a smallpert of their revenue, which would go to the Bacula project.
I'd prefer a rather limited number of people actually doing the writing
and thinking, but I'm sure they would get all the support thy needed
through the mailing lists. And I'd suggest to follow a pre-determined
schedule, because these documentation projects might become tightly
connected and they might have to rely on results from parallel projects.
)
Arno
Regards
Andrew
Kern Sibbald wrote:
---------- Forwarded Message ----------
Subject: Time for a Bacula book?
Date: Saturday 07 January 2006 01:43
From: John Walker To: Kern Sibbald <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
One thing I've regretted over the last 10 years, is that I didn't
take time out in the height of the Speak Freely madness to write a
guide for
people interested in deploying it which would probably have been
picked up by
O'Reilly since many of their books cover software with far fewer
downloads
than Speak Freely.
Maybe the time has come for a Bacula book.
Is there somebody in the Bacula user community, ideally an articulate
person
employed by a large-scale site, who would be interested in writing a book
called, say, "Deploying Bacula"? This would be a typical O'Reilly title
which was aimed at the system administrator who wants to roll out
Bacula on
their network. A substantial part of the book could be cut and pasted
from
the existing HTML documentation as a reference, and additional chapters
could cover the issues in getting autochangers to work, heterogeneous
site
support, and complex configurations (multiple storage nodes, encrypted
links, VPN issues, etc.)
Having an O'Reilly title is a huge step up for an OpenSource product.
There's nothing wrong with, as Mike Ford used to say, "making it happen".
===
[Mike Ford is an Autodesk founder and was our first Marketing and
Sales manager -- kes]
=================================
Hello,
Last weekend, John Walker send me the above email, and I think he is
right. It is time to do a Bacula book. This would not be a simple,
short, or easy project because: 1. writing a book is a lot of work (I
have never written one, but I have written a lot of manuals); 2. It is
not at all clear that O'Reilly or any other major publisher would
accept a Bacula book as I suspect that Bacula is relatively unknown ...
Nevertheless, I would like to find someone to undertake this project,
preferrably with the kinds of skills mentioned by John. For my part,
I can work on finding a publisher, contribute a good amount of the
work and provide authorization to use any part of the current manual.
In turn, I would expect that the person or persons who work on this
would share any royalties with the Bacula project; details to be
determined ...
Comments?
Does this interest anyone?
Regards Kern
PS: If I remember correctly there is at least one "printing company"
that uses Bacula. If you could be of any help finding a publisher,
please let me know.
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