On Wed, 2006-04-05 at 16:25 -0500, John Mahowald wrote:
I'm John Mahowald, an undergraduate computer science student at
the
University of St Thomas, MN, USA. I do a bit of programming,
particularly in Java. I've been using Linux since RHL in 2002.
Recently I have done package reviews and sponsored packagers for
Extras, as well as maintain a couple. fedorared on freenode IRC. I
also am a community manager (Jman) at
http://fedoraforum.org. Someday
I may want to persue a way of importing some of the how tos there and
polishing them up.
Welcome to the project!
For the docs project I am interested in DocBook-izing existing plain
text documentation and working my way toward writing. I have done
some decent writing but this would be my first real technical writing
experience. As to editing, I want to do both grammar and technical.
The Documentation Guide is a very good resource on both technology and
writing style:
http://fedora.redhat.com/docs/documentation-guide/
One easy way to approach it is to check out the example-tutorial and a
couple of the published documents from CVS, use them as a reference, and
go back to the Guide as you need to. The Guide covers a lot of ground,
and reading it cold may be a little overwhelming.
You are welcome to post queries or a request for comments on a draft to
this list at any time - feel free to experiment and ask for help as
issues arise.
Stuff I would like to see documented more include package building
tools, like plague and a how to for remastering anaconda install CDs.
I also want to push the building packages guide along toward publish
status. Finally, I'm interested in an updated kickstart guide. Overall
I'm into documentation that increases the amount of available software
for Fedora and the number of installed Fedora systems.
There's definitely a lot of interesting stuff around deployment and
software management, so deciding where to start may be the most
difficult challenge :).
IMO, the key thing for pushing a document to edit and publication is
that the text has to provide enough support for a user to perform
whatever task the document focuses on. Once a document explains the
basic task then it's easy enough to expand the coverage in subsequent
versions - the first version doesn't have to be a comprehensive guide,
or cover all aspects of a topic.
--
Stuart Ellis
stuart(a)elsn.org
Fedora Documentation Project:
http://fedora.redhat.com/projects/docs/
GPG key ID: 7098ABEA
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