Edward C. Bailey wrote:
It was at this time that those of us involved in producing Red Hat's documentation looked at the the Linux Documentation Project as the most viable approach for the documentation aspect of the Fedora Project. We felt that it would be more likely for interested people to write shorter tutorial-style documents than it would be for them to create large, monolithic manuals. We felt that the "infrastructure" (style guides, editorial support, etc) would be lower for the smaller, separate documents. As the documentation project grew, it could be extended to include full-blown manuals, but our thinking was to start small.
Perhaps we've underestimated the kinds of documentation-related projects people would like to take on -- certainly the content produced by the Debian project is a good counter-example of what a dedicated group of individuals can accomplish (though I'll note that the Debian project has been around a while, and comparing a brand-new Fedora Project to a firmly-established Debian Project is not entirely fair)...
It seems that the best way to end this email is to pose a question:
Where do we go from here?
I think Fedora needs good installation and configuration manuals. Without these, it will never be possible to get a good user base (unless a majority of current Red Hat Linux users switch to Fedora). The 'tutorial-idea' is good, the Linux Documentation Project is good, but we cannot count on those two alone to provide enough information about the whole Fedora distribution.
Whatever we do, we *must* have a good installation and configuration manual. So let's start writing now ;)
Greetings,
Jan Fabry
