Documentation - Linux Documentation Project Weekly News

Linux Documentation Project news: The Linux Documentation Project Weekly News
Issue Number: 03
Publication Date: 2006-12-28

The State of the LDP Weekly News:

As the observant reader will notice this is issue 3 of what has become a not quite weekly newsletter. Most of the summer was unusually quiet on the mailing lists and it was not until December that activity once more picked up to a more familiar level of activity

Discussions on the LDP lists

Debian and documentation

One of the big topics was the announcement that Debian moves GFDL documentation to non-free. This means that to install these documents one has to obtain them from the non-free category. The choice of license has been a sure fire topic since the early days of the LDP and it proved so this time too.

Spam and other Nuisances on the Mailing Lists

Phishing attempts were seen, allegedly from security at Paypal. Ser proposed blocking schemes at the SMTP. Lately other mailing lists seem to have been subscribed in such a way that people posting to TLDP lists will get error messages back. New administrator privileges are being set up to deal with that and unsubscribe these lists. More seriously it seems the mailing lists are not properly archived, which also is the reason why discussion links are not hotlinked from this issue of Weekly News. This will be looked into shortly. As a workaround the LDP mailing lists are now also archived on gmane.org.

LDP Bugs

Another regular topic is that of a central bug database for LDP. Currently we have the very manual email option at feedback(at)en.tldp.org and emails coming from the Debian bug database. A LDP specific Bugzilla-database was proposed but nothing decided on yet.

Document Removal

Only rarely are documents removed but the "KDE-GUI-Login-Configuration-HOWTO" for KDE 1.x was archived at the request of the author since he felt it was no longer needed.

Benefits of Authoring a Document on LDP

A brief discussion shows that several contributors have received multiple job offers as a result of authoring documents for LDP. The discussion showed that people find LDP work useful during job interviews. As it happens LDP would be happy to receive more volunteers so there could indeed be an opportunity for you.

Recruitment

David Lawyer informed the lists that he had recruited a couple of new volunteers for LDP. This is excellent news. He also had suggestions regarding how and where to find more volunteers.

Wiki Style Editing

Wikipedia has been reviewed earlier and also tested on a smaller scale but there are still the occasional discussions about trying it again. One is at Riverworth (based on Mediawiki),

Author Guide

Machetelt Garrels proposed to take over the Author Guide and there was no opposition.

New Maintainers for Old Documents

Another regular topic is the difficulties encountered when a new maintainer wants to take over an existing document but, as often is the case, the old maintainer is not reachable on the email address stated in the document itself. Frequently the license chosen makes a total rewrite necessary. Contributors are therefore urged to update documents with new addresses and to consider licenses that permit third party editing.

Updated HOWTOs, FAQs and Guides

As usual, a large number of new and updated documents has been uploaded since the last news bulletin in LWN:

A number of new documents are also in preparation.

The LDP/LDPWN mini-HOWTO

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 our low volume discussion mailing list <[email protected]>
You can also send your suggestions to <[email protected]>

This issue of the LDP Weekly News was compiled, edited and published by Stein Gjoen with help from several other people. To receive this newsletter weekly in your mailbox, subscribe to the news mailing list <[email protected]> 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 <[email protected]>
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