Re: Proposing help for documentation

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On Wed, 02 Nov 2016, Luis de Bethencourt <luisbg@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> I also offer my help, let me know if you see anything I can do.

Luis, Patrice, anyone else out there willing to help: here's a list of
stuff to do, off the top of my head. I'm sure Jon will amend this.

0) Some basics first

Subscribe to linux-doc. Read it.

Read https://lwn.net/Articles/692705/ and
https://lwn.net/Articles/704613/ if you haven't already.

Figure out how to build the documentation. Read the part about writing
kernel documentation. Also at
http://static.lwn.net/kerneldoc/kernel-documentation.html.

For most things under Documentation, you'll want to use the docs-next
branch of git://git.lwn.net/linux.git. That has the latest stuff. If you
use Linus' master, you'll be working on old stuff.

For fixing kernel-doc source code comments, you'll need to use the
appropriate subsystem tree, see MAINTAINERS.

In any case, most changes need to be sent to both linux-doc and the
relevant subsystem/driver mailing list. See MAINTAINERS and
scripts/get_maintainer.pl.

Whatever you do, don't spend forever polishing it privately. Otherwise
someone might beat you to it, and effort will be wasted. Read the list,
maybe someone's already posted patches that just haven't been merged
yet.

1) Build documentation. Look at errors during build, fix them.

Some of the issues come from source code comments via the kernel-doc
extension; those changes need to go through the appropriate subsystem,
not via the documentation tree. Watch out, some of the things may have
been fixed in the subsystem repo already.

2) Build documentation. Read the output, fix issues, improve the
language, improve the presentation. Ditto about source code comments.

Personally, I think this is both very important and unfortunately
laborous, because this is mostly stuff that Sphinx won't warn about.

3) Look at documentation patches on linux-doc, review them, test them,
give feedback.

4) Convert DocBook templates under Documentation/DocBook to Sphinx.

The conversion is actually the easy part; figuring out whether the
documentation is still relevant and where to stick it in the Sphinx
build is harder. Jon may have some vision on this, but personally I'd
like to obliterate DocBook first, and then figure out what to do with
the resulting converted rst documents.

5) Convert .txt files under Documentation to .rst.

There are caveats here. Not everything needs to be converted. Some of
the stuff is obsolete, and converting might be wasted effort. Just
converting without updating to reflect current kernels is hazardous,
because the obsolete information will then be more accessible with the
converted documentation on the web.

People like plain text, don't go overboard with rst markup. Use
discretion.


For both 4) and 5) I'd really like the seasoned kernel devs to actively
hand out stuff to willing new hands.


HTH,
Jani.

-- 
Jani Nikula, Intel Open Source Technology Center
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