Re: Zynot Documentation/Marketing Vision

Likewise, my development skills are not what you might call "polished", and
I would like very much to be involved in the documentation, administration,
and infrastructure facets of this project.  I have "cast my hat into the
wiki" and hope to be doing some things there soon...

----- Original Message -----
From: "Aaron Goldblatt" <[email protected]>
To: <[email protected]>
Sent: Saturday, June 28, 2003 8:20 PM
Subject: Re: [zynaut] Zynot Documentation/Marketing Vision


> > Zynot Documentation/Marketing Vision
>
> First let me thank you for putting this semi-document together.  I
> personally don't have the skills to do development.  I understand
> enough of development concepts to be really dangerous, but I can help
> do things like conceptual design and identify resources needed to
> accomplish a given task.
>
> My interest in joining the project has been looking toward
> documentation.
>
> A major downfall of every distribution I've ever messed with is a lack
> of good documentation, especially in the area of troubleshooting guides
> and technical problem resultion assistance.
>
> Gentoo has a pretty straight-forward installation guide, but once
> that's done, at least in terms of easy access for a new user, it seemed
> to me to be catch-as-catch-can on IRC.
>
> Debian's installation documentation is pretty good, but again,
> explanation of things like networking configuration has always been
> hard for me, and I'm someone who's relatively educated with respect to
> Linux distributions.
>
> I've bought the professional docs for things like RedHat and SuSE and
> again, found them lacking for problems beyond initial simple
> configuration.  ISC's dhcpd, for example, has a plethora of options
> that an intelligent administrator might find extremely useful, but I
> had a hard time deciphering the man page.  It shouldn't take me two
> hours of trial and error with dhcpd.conf when a well written doc would
> have helped me immensely.
>
> For a well-packaged and professional distribution (which is a good
> goal for a product meant for the professional world), fix docs are
> vital to reduction of our support costs and the increase of the value
> of our product to our customers.
>
> We need documentation of APIs.  We need documentation of install.  We
> need simplified and more complete documentation of common utilities,
> the structure and execution of /etc/init.d, the order in which various
> system services are brought up (both before and after init.d is run),
> and how to manipulate and control those services effectively.
>
> We could use a kernel compilation troubleshooting guide, because a
> custom kernel is frequently vital to a custom implementation.
> Especially with the new problems of gcc and kernel v2.4.19, a
> comprehensible documentation consisting of more than just a Perl and
> awk/sed script fix is well warranted and will go a long way toward
> enhancing the respect with which our distribution will be viewed.
>
> I'm ready to help find the places where we should start a ZDP, and help
> identify what we should document first, and coordinate documentation
> with development, because they go hand-in-hand.
>
> ag
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