The 9 Documentation Project

[sirjofri+ml-9front@sirjofri.de]

Hello all,

I thought about this some time and think we can do documentation better. Of course we have the very good fqa (which is 9front "only") and the official man pages as well as other documentation sources and guides. Most of these guides are distributed in various personal blogs and contribution to man pages and the fqa takes time (patch creation, review).

Since many of us users do happily provide information and guides as well as write ups I think we can create one active place for documentation that's too much for the fqa and the man pages as well as highly dynamic with changes everyday. (I want to mention the arch wiki as an example.)

My dream is something like a publicly available wiki system (wikifs?) with good structure where every nine user can contribute to without review. It would be interesting to have real authenticated accounts for write access, but that might be too much.

Here are some points I thought about and we can discuss:


- the documentation is publicly available, readable for everyone
- only plan 9 users can write (to prevent spamming)
- users need only plan 9 board tools to access the wiki (no extra software needed)
- discussion board for pages/page sections (no email needed)
- discussion chat for real-time discussions about the wiki (like hubchat/ants, documentation related content preferred)
- multi-distribution support. Most users use 9front, but it's worth mentioning differences between systems. This should happen in a structured manner.
- documentation download: users can download pages for offline reading. Maybe typeset and/or different formats.
- having authenticated user access would be interesting to see how a public auth server can work. This is not necessary, but I think it's worth it (and it can be used for other future fileserver projects)

These are just some ideas we can discuss. Keep in mind I don't want to create another distributed source for documentation, but a central "wiki" you can use to share information with other users, so we can collect all undocumented knowledge in one place.

I know there are other wiki places, for example:

9gridchan wiki, with focus on ANTS tools and the public grid project. I don't think people go there for general plan 9 advise.

9p.io wiki, which is more like an archive for the original plan 9 wiki. I don't know who owns this and how actively it's used.

Also this is _not_ meant as a replacement for the man pages and the fqa. The project should also encourage users (and developers) to contribute to the man pages. There are programs that don't even have a man page, as well as missing important information.

With this I want to open the discussion, feel free to share your ideas and comments. I hope we can make some good documentation together.

sirjofri