short intro to debian documentation / Re: Outreachy project about improving documentation and website content (Re: Sign up to mentor for Outreachy Round 15)

Joost van Baal-Ilić <[email protected]> Thu, 5 Oct 2017 04:43:32 +0200

Newsgroups	gmane.linux.debian.devel.documentation,gmane.linux.debian.outreach,gmane.linux.debian.devel.www
Message-ID	<[email protected]>

Hi Keerthana,

On Sun, Sep 10, 2017 at 11:22:05PM +0530, Keerthana Krishnan wrote:
> Laura wrote:
> > What follows is about the website part, I'm not member of the
> > documentation team
> > nor am much familiarized with their repos/sources.
> >
> > I never mentored in Outreachy/GSoC and I think I personally have not enough
> > spare time to devote to do a full mentoring (or co-mentoring) in this term,
> > but I can help in the technical part of changing the website (for example,
> > helping with the wml syntax, or if the intern submits the proposed changes
> > as bugs to the www.debian.org pseudopackages, I can review them and upload
> > them when they are ready. Well, if the outreachy intern sends their
> > "deliverables" in form of patches, anybody in the website team can
> > review/upload ;) I just mean that I would try to prioritize those so you
> > can evaluate their work as mentor based in the team output).
> >
> > Maybe you can find useful to use usertags
> >
> > https://wiki.debian.org/bugs.debian.org/usertags
> >
> > to categorize as "content" or "documentation" the website bugs that the
> > intern
> > can work on:
> >
> > For now, we have the following bugs tagged as "content":
> >
> > https://udd.debian.org/cgi-bin/bts-usertags.cgi?tag=
> > content&user=www.debian.org%40packages.debian.org
> >
> > Maybe there is another (better) way to do this, but as I said, I have no
> > experience mentoring.

Apart from what Laura said, I can add some pointers to documentation-work (not
the Debian website stuff).  All what she said is true for me and documentation
too, especially this: I myself have little time, but I can give a hand here and
there.  Anyway:

We have

 Debian GNU/Linux FAQ
 Debian Installation Guide
 Debian Release Notes
 Debian Reference Card
 The Debian Administrator's Handbook
 Debian Developer's Reference
 Guide for Debian Maintainers
 Debian New Maintainers' Guide

and other documents.  Most of them are maintained in some form of XML, most of
them are maintained using git, and for most of them the
[email protected] list is used for discussing issues.  Most of them
are published on www.debian.org and also in the form of a Debian package (so
people can do e.g. "sudo apt install debian-faq" to have a local copy of the
Debian GNU/Linux FAQ .)  Most of them are available in both HTML and PDF, and
in multiple languages.

At https://www.debian.org/doc/ you can find an overview of which documents are
maintained within Debian, from a user/reader point of view.

At https://www.debian.org/doc/ddp there's an overview from a documentation
maintainer point of view.

Linked from there, there is e.g.
https://www.debian.org/doc/user-manuals#relnotes with information about
maintaining the Debian Release Notes.  And linked from there there is
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?pkg=release-notes;dist=unstable
which is an overview of the current open bugs in the Release Notes document.

Does this work to get you started?  Please let me know if you have any other
questions.

Thanks for your interest! Bye,

Joost

signature.asc (application/pgp-signature, 819 B)