discuss: Proposing some new HOWTOs
Subject:
Re: Proposing some new HOWTOs
From:
David Lawyer ####@####.####
Date:
29 Sep 2001 06:08:18 -0000
Message-Id: <20010928230852.B297@lafn.org>
On Thu, Sep 27, 2001 at 06:01:35PM -0400, David Merrill wrote:
> > Would the LDP be interested in assisting on a pan-Unix documentation
> > effort? While there are certainly documents that are specific to an OS
> > (tuning, kernel configuration, that sort of thing) there are many that
> > aren't, or that have only a few sections that are OS specific.
>
> As I said elsewhere, and as Josh has indicated by his opinions, there
> would be resistance to a single organization, and I agree with him
> that we do not want for us or any project to give up their identities,
> because we each have our own audiences whose needs we serve.
>
> However, what about an umbrella organization, which would include
> representatives of all the groups? IMHO it is coordination,
> duplication of work, and standardization of formats and usages of
> DocBook that are most important.
One thing that would be nice to do (but not really urgent) is to find
people who are willing to examine the documentation of all the groups
and then propose what needs to be done. It would be nice if the
authors on similar topics in different groups were aware of each
other. Perhaps some could collaborate if the differences in content
were not too great. The umbrella people would find documents that
appear to be "duplication of effort" and let the authors know about
the existence of this suspected "duplication". It often turns out
that different approaches to the same topic are beneficial so that
what seems like "duplication of effort" has some positive aspects as
well.
The umbrella people could also propose that html links be put on the
homepages of LDP, FreeBSD, etc which would link to significant docs
of other projects. Again I'm not sure if it's worth the effort.
Individuals that realize that certain links are desirable can just
suggest them.
Do we have a history and summary of the Open Documentation Environment
project (ODE) of early 2000? This thread had hundreds of messages.
They planned to use OSWG as their website. There were a lot of good
ideas here but apparently few or no people to actually implement them.
David Lawyer
