>On Tuesday 17 October 2006 18:41, Dominik Haumann wrote: >> On Tuesday 17 October 2006 16:57, Bastian, Waldo wrote: >> > About to start! >> >> I wasn't able to join the channel in time. Are there any notes or irc >logs >> I can read? > >I've attached my IRC log. > >It is a very big project if you ask me and it is still very vague(not that >I would expect anything else at this point).
Distilled version below: Executive Summary Common practices for documentation and usage of metadata could allow more effective use of existing documentation efforts. A set of useful metadata should be defined. Linux magazines should be engaged to see if it is viable to use magazine content as part of Linux platform documentation on a structural basis. Participants: <FransE> I'm Frans Englich, KDE and XML hacker. My interest in this is rather general; I'd like to see a doc. solution for GNOME, KDE and all the other open source projects out there. <cherry> I'm John Cherry and I am the OSDL Desktop Linux (DTL) initiative manager. Developer documentation is one of those topics that always comes up in the development community, but noone has the budget or bandwidth to make it happen. Part of the problem is pulling documentation together from across distributions and commuity organization. A daunting task. <wbastian> I am Waldo Bastian, chairman of the OSDL Desktop Linux (DTL) tech board. In DTL's quest for Linux deskop world domination the data points to application availability as a major barrier to adoption... to overcome that it is important to make the platform attractive for ISVs. Presenting Linux as a single platform to ISVs is an important aspect of that... given Linux's relative small market segment share any fragmentation detoriates ISV interest in the platform rapidly <ghopper> I am Gordon Hopper, a software engineer. I'm a big fan of open source software and Linux, but the fragmentation makes it confusing to sell to my bosses. Links http://englich.wordpress.com/2006/10/17/open-source-documentation-framew ork/ http://live.gnome.org/ProjectMallard http://www.freestandards.org/en/Developers http://www.opensearch.org/ http://developer.osdl.org/dev/desktop_architects/index.php/Key_Topics Summary Good documentation of the Linux platform remains a challenge. Many projects struggle to find enough volunteers to write new documentation or update existing. A way to improve the situation would be to make more efficient usage of existing documentation efforts which, as a side effect, would make it more interesting to invest in such documentation efforts. A distributed documentation framework was discussed that would help making more effective use of documentation. Early ideas for such a system center around a docbook based content model with extensive usage of metadata for tagging purposes and RSS style feeds to publish update and change information. The distributed model would consist of content publishers, typically open source projects, and content consumers, typically some kind of developer portal. The update feeds would inform portals about new content or changes to existing content that the portal can then (re-)fetch. A portal would be able to subscribe to multiple feeds from different providers. A portal would typically take the docbook based content and transform it to HTML based on a portal specific stylesheet. Users of the portal would be able to search portals based on traditional text based searches, but additional metadata would allow the quality of searches to be improved. A problem with existing documentation (of the howto style) is that it is often not clear how up to date or relevant it still is. Ideally documentatin should be reviewed at regular intervals by someone authoratitive in the project for which it is written. It would be useful to capture in metadata when a piece of documentation was last reviewed and by whom. With a distributed content model (like we have today already) it is also important to route feedback or corrections back to the responsible party. Again metadata can be used here to point to an upstream issue tracker suitable for collecting such feedback. The framework will depend on a certain uniformity of the content, for example content may need to be in docbook format. Today, a lot of "howto" style articles are being written for various Linux magazines. It would be interesting to explore working together with these publishers to find a way to better leverage these articles as documentation for the Linux platform by hooking it into the outlined documentation framework. A documentation framework would also benefit from the ability to map versions of specific software components to specific distribution versions and/or LSB versions, some of this information is toay already available from distrowatch. Also mapping higher-level concepts to specific components would be helpful since people may not always know what they are looking for. A critical aspect of a distributed documentation framework seems to be the definition of a common set of metadata to tag content with. Action Items & Next Steps * Engage linux magazines to get their perspective and interest to participate * Draft a set of metadata to tag documentation with * Next irc meeting on November 14 to discuss metadata draft * Followup discussion on https://lists.osdl.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop_architects Waldo Bastian Linux Client Architect - Client Linux Foundation Technology Channel Platform Solutions Group Intel Corporation - http://www.intel.com/opensource OSDL DTL Tech Board Chairman _______________________________________________ Desktop_architects mailing list Desktop_architects@lists.osdl.org https://lists.osdl.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop_architects