2005 11, 12 & 13 The Linux Documentation Project 2005-03-30 The LDP Volunteer Responsibility Descriptions David Horton started on TLDP Job Descriptions. Currently defined are Author, Chief Coordinator, Document Publisher, Document Reviewer, Mirror Maintainer, News Contributor, News Editor and Technical Contributor. David will be further polling and charting out the responsibilities of all volunteers; the goal is to include this documentation on the TLDP site to make it clear to people who want to contribute to and understand the procedures of the LDP. The LDP publishing process Machtelt Garrels is working on a graphical representation of the publishing process and the maintenance flowchart which is to be included in the Author Guide. She also proposed to make a flowchart of the relation between the job responsibilities within TLDP as an addition to David Horton's work. A draft of the flowchart is available. New German Translations Stephan Reuter has started the Linux Archive site, where you can find HOWTOs and other documents in German. Among the ever-growing list of translated documents: Pre-Installation-Checklist Howto Installation HOWTO Linux from Scratch TLDP Wikified Mirror Blake Benthall proposed to set up a Wikified mirror. The proposal was discussed at large and Blake setup a preliminary WIKI for testing of his HTML to WIKI conversion scripts at the site http://tldp.sys-techs.com/wiki/index.php/Special:Allpages. Modifiability of Documents Rahul Sundaram wanted to include "modifiability of documents as a licensing requirement" in the LDP manifesto and also suggested modifying the authors guide. This led to a discussion on licensing and various licenses available for documentation. Emma Jane Hogbin posted changes to the authors guide and asked for suggestions and comments. The thread petered out and went on to discuss how Debian handles documentation and Emma sent a mail to the maintainers to the doc-linux and doc-linux-nonfree Debian packages requesting a "a succinct explanation on the distinction so that they [TLDP authors] may choose the best license for their document". Proposed LDP Organization: Subject Specialists David Lawyer proposed that The LDP partition the existing and expected future LDP docs into say 20-40 categories and find a subject specialist for each category. She would first review all the docs on this subject. If docs were not being adequately maintained, she would try to find new authors. She would also try to find authors for areas covered by the subject but not adequately by any LDP docs. She would suggest mergers or splits in exiting documents. New doc proposals would go to the appropriate subject specialist. He said that there should be a subject specialist coordinator and the subject specialist coordinator would need to have good knowledge of all aspects of Linux and have time to check out the facts when disputes arose. The subject specialist coordinator and assistants would initially have to find people to do reviews for cases where there was no subject specialist to do it. The subject specialist coordinator might keep a list of people willing to do technical reviews. People in general thought that this would be a good idea and went on to discuss it further. Vikas Singhal proposed to write a Open Source Databases for Linux HOWTO. The document will explain installation and configuration of various open source databases, such as MySQL, PostgreSQL, MaxDB, and Firebird, on Linux platform. This document will also provide comparison among these databases. This will not be a very detailed manual but an overview and will provide pointers for further information. Rahul Sundaram expressed his interest in the document and indicated the Vikas should post his proposal and drafts to the discuss list. Vivek Varghese Cherian offered help with the document. Christophe Devine took the time to update all the package version numbers in the Encrypted Root Filesystem HOWTO v1.3. The document is now also available in CVS. Another addition to CVS is v0.9 of the BTTV HOWTO. This is the first attempt at rewrite of the document, so comments are welcome! Mendel Cooper released v3.3 of the Advanced Bash-Scripting Guide, which contains again lots of bug fixes and several new example scripts. Artemiy I. Pavlov released v1.7 of his SquashFS HOWTO, this new version has modifications in the document to cover the SquashFS release 2.1. The following are the latest additions to our list of mirrors: Nels Martens: http://www.codesrc.net/LDP in El Segundo, CA, USA and updated daily. Yevgeniy Skrypets: http://ldp.tolix.org/ in Burlingame, CA, USA and updated daily at 1am PST. The Linux Documentation Project (TLDP) is working on developing free, high quality documentation for the GNU/Linux operating system. If you want to help TLDP, consider joining discuss-subscribe@en.tldp.org (a low volume discussion mailing list). You can also send your suggestions to feedback@en.tldp.org. The LDP Weekly News is compiled, edited and published by Machtelt Garrels (Tille) and Y Giridhar Appaji Nag (Giri) with help from several other people. To receive this newsletter weekly in your mailbox, subscribe to the news-subscribe@en.tldp.org mailing list. Back issues are available at http://tldp.org/ldpwn Help us create this newsletter. We need volunteers who follow the community (mailing lists, newsgroups, web channels) and report events related to free software documentation. Write to us at feedback@en.tldp.org.