As some of you may know, I have been threatening to campaign for a
successful Perl Documentation Project. A project that would work like
the Linux Documentation Project.
Well, this message has less to do with that than it does with the
standard documentation. Pete Sergeant has put together a fairly good
complaint list (http://perl.clueball.com) about the standard
documentation.
What Pete and I would like to see is a full scale editorial and
technical attack on the standard documentation (the stuff under pod/,
mostly).
Along the same lines, Sean Burke has developed some good guidelines
for writing POD that the standard documentation should abide by.
perldoc needs some major updates.
This will be a large undertaking and we already have a mailing list.
We need a place to store editorial and technical suggestions, doc bug
list, feature requests, etc. Ask, should this place be at
docs.perl.org or something similar?
Also, I had talked to Tim O'Reilly and and ORA editor about the
possibility of getting help from ORA editors. They were very
interested in helping, and mentioned they would as much as they
could. They are all very busy so, any help we could get from O'Reilly
editors will be a very Good Thing, but could also be few and far
between.
I am not an editor, some of you have the skills to help with this
important project. We'll need editors, writers, programmers, readers
and testers. We'll need to decide how to do this. All of us can help
in some way.
This (smaller, in comparison) project will also help me determine how
the PDP will progress and live. My hope is that it will be a strong
effort. Documentation is just as important, if not more important,
than patching the core. If you're looking for a way to help the Perl
Porters, this is an excellent opportunity!
Casey West
--
There are three kinds of death in this world. There's heart death,
there's brain death, and there's being off the network.
-- Guy Almes
