Category:Docs Project: Difference between revisions

The mission of Fedora's Documentation Project is to improve the overall experience of Fedora users and contributors by providing documentation. We explain how to use certain software and systems, provide written accounts of special events (like releases), and recommend settings for software and systems (in terms of security, performance, and other concerns). In pursuing this work, the Docs Project creates and uses only free and open-source software, content, tools, and processes, so our documentation is reusable, modifiable, and rebuildable by anyone, for free, forever.

Where is documentation for using Fedora Linux?

• http://docs.fedoraproject.org - full-length guides
• http://fedoraproject.org/wiki - wiki (70% contributor-focused, 30% user-focused)

Participating in the Docs Project

Joining the Documentation Project
To join the Fedora Documentation Project, jump to Joining the Docs Project for details on how to sign up. If you are interested in translating Fedora documentation, jump over to the L10n (localization) Project's wiki pages.

If you are interested in participating in some aspect of the Docs Project, you need a Fedora account, to introduce yourself to the team, and talk about what you want to do.

How can you help? Collaborating on existing works, writing new content, editing and providing feedback on existing and draft content, and working on the wiki team.

What can you do? Some examples: edit existing wiki pages; draft documents on the wiki; find problems in existing docs and report or fix them; work on formal docs in Subversion or git repositories; collaborate with other Fedora teams or hosted projects.

The full steps are in Joining the Docs Project.

Communication channels

• Mailing List: For formal discussions, the Fedora Documentation Project uses the docs mailing list.
• IRC: For informal discussions about Fedora Documentation, many members of the project frequent the #fedora-docs channel on irc.freenode.net.
• Talk: For project discussions we sometimes use the Fedora Talk VoIP system. Our conference room is 2008.
• Meetings: Weekly Fedora Documentation Project meetings are held on Wednesdays at 2300 UTC, in the #fedora-meeting channel on irc.freenode.net. Check out the Meetings wiki page for past meetings minutes, and the agenda for the upcoming meeting.

How we do it.

Documents typically begin life on the Fedora wiki. This is to aid the development of the document until it can be finalized. Unfinished documents are categorized as Category:Draft_Documentation. Once the document is deemed complete, the Draft_Documentation category is replaced by the Category:Documentation category.

If the documentation is deemed to be "official" and in need of a more permanent home, the wiki pages are translated into Docbook XML of which can then be used to generate HTML and RPM files that are used to disseminate to the public. HTML files are published at http://docs.fedoraproject.org and RPM files are published in the Fedora repository.

More details are found on the Docs Project workflow page.

What we are working on now.

Draft and informal documentation

The Fedora Wiki is used to create draft versions of documentation and also provides a place for non-formal documentation.

Formal documentation

All formal documentation is located at http://docs.fedoraproject.org. These guides are written in DocBook XML and compiled using Publican.

We are working on a number of guides that aid users in setting up and using Fedora:

• Installation Guide
• Release Notes
• Security Guide
• SELinux Guide
• User Guide
• Deployment Guide
• RPM Guide
• Amateur Radio Guide

Task list

We use Red Hat's Bugzilla instance for tracking issues and tasks within the Docs Project. It is always helpful to provide input and patches to bugs.

You can query Bugzilla or use one of the following links to find tickets that are open:

• New tickets that have not been assigned.
• All tickets, new and assigned, that have not been closed.

Documentation licensing

All documentation produced by Fedora is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike License 3.0 Unported License.