Developer Documentation

Hi all,
(Hopefully "all" is a large number.)

I'm hoping to take some time to began to learn some of the internals of
Amanda's code in order to be able to contribute to code maintenance and
development. I've read through various section of the code which happen to
be of interest based on whatever I was doing Amanda-wise at the moment.
What I've found is that it is a labyrinth that is hard (for me) to
navigate. With that in mind, I thought a good place to start would be to
create some developer documentation. I have contributed to the wiki over
the years and realize that there is some such material available. However,
it is quite dated and disorderly.

I'd like to begin ordering it and updating it as I go. I think that will
also give me a better grasp of the larger picture code-wise, and enable me
to begin hacking accordingly.

To begin with, I'd like to develop a document which describes the various
components of Amanda and their links. From there, I plan to drill down and
deal with each component. This looks to be similar to the current layout of
the Amanda git repo. I plan to start the documents in ODF and post them to
a git repo. Perhaps I could crosswalk them to Latex or RTF or XYZ if that
would work better. They could also be wiki-ized.

I would like to get API documents, log formats, DB schemas, etc. documented
as well.

I would be appreciative of any assistance at all. I will need help from
those who are still around who know the internals. I think that if we can
get a decent set of docs out, it may greatly encourage larger developer
participation in Amanda.

FWIW, I have contributed largely in development and project management of
the Koha ILS system: www.koha-community.org both as a gratis and paid
developer. My strengths are in Perl, JS, etc. I tinker with Arduino
hardware/firmware development as well, so am not unfamiliar with C. I have
used Amanda now for about eight years. In general it has worked great.

Another thing I would like to see in the long run is a OSS Window$ client.

Over the next few weeks, I will toss out a few draft docs for feedback. In
the meantime, I will probably have many questions. If you know of a current
document that addresses my question, feel free to just point me to it.
However, please look first to be sure it is current.

Kind regards,
Chris