GDP Status Report

1. Status Reports

This is the status of the Gentoo Documentation Project. It will be posted regularly, but not with a static frequency. All questions can be posted to gentoo-doc@gentoo.org or to me personally.

The Gentoo Documentation Project, from now on abbreviated to GDP, has its own project page (just like almost all other Gentoo projects). You can find it at http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/gdp.

Content

This status mail will briefly discuss the following tasks, objectives and/or projects related to the GDP:

New / Updated Documentation
New Year Goals
Gentoo 2005.0 Documentation

2. New / Updated Documentation

Daniel Drake has updated the The Complete Gentoo Linux 2.6 Migration Guide with additional known pitfalls and solutions.

The Gentoo Security Guide and Gentoo Powermanagement Guide have also received some updating love.

Sune Kloppenborg Jeppesen wrote a Gentoo mailfiltering gateway guide, covering spam-fighting technologies and anti-virus protection.

Thomas Martin wrote a UTF-8 Guide for Gentoo, covering both the theory behind Unicode (and more specifically, UTF-8) and practice on your Gentoo system.

Dan Armak has written up a KDE Split Ebuilds HOWTO which we gracefully added to our repository.

Of course, we shouldn't forget all the updates to the other guides, such as spelling and grammar fixes and bugfixes that were reported to Bugzilla.

An overview of all fixed bugreports since the last status update can be found on Gentoo's bugtracking system.

3. New Year Goals

For 2005, the Gentoo Documentation Project will focus on the following goals.

Pull in developers/contributors

For the non-x86 installation instructions.
Only a few developers are frequently busy with the installation instructions and most knowledge is situated at the x86 instructions.
For the various projects that Gentoo is rich.
There are quite a few guides that are project-specific and some projects don't even have lots of documentation (if they have any at all). We should be able to train interested developers in GuideXML so they can focus on the documentation of that particular project.
For our own repository.
New documents are always welcomed, but existing documentation must also be maintained.

Reintroduce Status Updates

Check who is part of the GDP and require a monthly status update. It seems that there are many developers "part" of GDP but their last action (whether commit, bug resolution or something else) happened a long time ago.

Improve documentation on GuideXML

The Coding Style for GuideXML should be moved elsewhere as it isn't really part of GuideXML itself. Improve descriptions as to "why" instead only "how" (e.g. "<abstract>" is used to blabla).

"Writing Style" documentation

For instance the AP Style Guide. Such document would explain how Gentoo writes its documentation (capitalised titles or not, coding style, ...). This enforces a bit more consistency across all documents.

Define Location of Documentation

This of course needs to be discussed with the various projects (probably in gentoo-dev). We will need to list the pro/cons clearly before attempting to create a definition/policy.

Audit the Existing Documentation

Verify if documentation is still valid, if no new way of handling things improves the situation, whether there are spelling mistakes, ...