Re: Developer Documentation

At least the Perl code I wrote was heavily and carefully documented in
POD.  Like Chap, I'd recommend keeping with that format.  Some more visible
infrastructure to post that for reference on the web would probably be
helpful.

Amanda's come a long way in being more developer friendly:
 * in a public VCS repository
 * on Github
 * developer documentation
 * less inscrutable (more scrutable?) code
 * Perl
 * well-defined APIs

But it has some way to go:
 * Actually accept pull requests (this is a biggie..)
 * Contributor-visible CI (such as Travis-CI, or a more public Buildbot
instance, or even dare I say it Taskcluster)

It's really not clear to me what the personnel situation is with Amanda,
nor what the future holds for Zmanda.  If there is anything remaining
there, ideally that would provide guidance.  Otherwise, I suppose it is up
to the interested parties, of which you (Chris) are currently the most
vocal, to take some leadership.  Amanda is open source and can easily be
forked!

I think there's an important choice to make, especially with a change of
leadership:
 * Try to build Amanda out as a tool for the modern era, with ephemeral
"cattle not pets" hosts, cloud storage and computing, "big data", and so on
 * Try to develop Amanda with a more specific focus on industries and users
that still operate in a model close to what Amanda was designed for
 * Try to "stabilize" Amanda as a mature, final product, shaving off rough
edges and simplifying unused functionality

Dustin

Op za 17 nov. 2018 om 09:30 schreef Chapman Flack <[email protected]>:

> On 11/17/18 8:48 AM, Ian Turner wrote:
> > More documentation is always helpful and your contributions would be
> > appreciated.
> > ...
> > I would caution you against adding a new documentation
> > format/repository, and against using ODF. My opinion (which is mostly
> > irrelevant) is that it would be best to keep to existing documentation
> > formats
>
> +1
>
> > — that means either text files, or the wiki. There used to be
> > some docbook documentation but it was moved to the wiki over a decade
> ago.
> Also not to overlook the man pages, which are still in Docbook XML
> format in the source tree. HTML and PDF renderings can be generated
> during the build. The HTML versions become accessible on the wiki
> at https://wiki.zmanda.com/man/
>
> The "DATA FORMATS" and "CONCEPTS" categories include material
> that could be considered developer documentation (and it would be
> great for the information on those pages to be expanded / kept in
> sync in new documentation efforts).
>
> And the documentation embedded in the Perl code, which also can get
> built into HTML and PDF, and the HTML versions end up at
> http://wiki.zmanda.com/pod/
>
> -Chap
>