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From: Richard Friedman (rchrd_at_[hidden])
Date: 2007-09-21 13:02:11

Wikis are good for most kinds of quick and simple docs. And the documentation pages on netbeans.org is a good model to follow.

But I think first we need to decide what kind of docs we're going to be creating from within the docs project. We could also create a "community wiki" along the lines of netbeans.org 's community docs pages that permit easy publishing (moderated) from anywhere by anyone.

At the moment, I'm not clear about what kinds of docs fall within the scope of the Open MPI project. I  (mistakenly) thought that a reference to the MPI API would be central. (I'm still not clear about the relationships between the MPI Forum and the Open MPI project. Maybe Jeff and I need to have a phone call sometime next week.  I'm really a newbie here.)

So before we can talk about how the docs will be published/distributed, and the tools associated with producing them, we need to determine just what kinds of user documentation this group will be producing, at least for this initial start-up phase.

Then we can talk about tools.

(As I mentioned earlier, DITA might not be a good solution, at least for now. What I'm hearing is that the features for reuse of content are great, but the overhead to produce content is high, and that the available free and open source tools are not of production quality, currently. That may take a few years. So I'm going to talk to the Sun people involved with OpenSolaris documentation. We also have people involved with NetBeans docs, so I'll be talking to them as well. Stay tuned.)

So, can we start a discussion about what kinds of user docs would be essential for a "Phase One" Open MPI project?

Jeff Squyres wrote: 
On Sep 20, 2007, at 1:08 AM, Amit Kumar Saha wrote:

  
I was wondering if the Open MPI docs could have a structure similar to
the NetBeans Community Docs
(http://wiki.netbeans.org/wiki/view/CommunityDocs)

My reasons for feeling the same:

1. Wiki style editing makes publishing docs easy
2. We could also make provision for easily printable formats like PDF


    
Also, as far as the managing is concerned, we could have a Community
Manager who will be in charge of making sure that we have quality docs
on the wiki. To assist the manager, we can have co-ordinators who will
play the role of spreading a word and getting more contributions for
the Open MPI docs.

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