man pages and handbooks

[Paul Wilson]

On 12/09/06, Duane Whitty <duane at dwlabs.ca> wrote:
>
> Paul Wilson wrote:
> > Duane,
> >
> > I was interested to read of your proposal to update the FreeBSD
> > Architecture Handbook on the documentation mailing list. It seems that
> > we've been experiencing similar problems of late; I too have been trying
> > my best to acquaint myself with SMPng, the different locks, atomic
> > operations etc, but have found the lack of native FreeBSD locking
> > documentation and advice to be a hinderence. Of your suggestions I
> > particularly liked the idea creating diagrams for illustration and
> > believe that they would be well applied for communicating lock
> > interactions.
> >
> > If you are open to assistance with your project then I would be more
> > than happy to help.
> >
> > Paul Wilson
>
> Hi,
>
> Of course help is always welcome.  What we should do, IMHO,
> is use the doc mailing list for our communications.  That
> way if others also want to join in they can.  As for the
> mechanics of collaboration I'm not sure what the best
> approach is just yet.  I guess one thing we could do is post
> patches to a website or either of us could setup a
> repository for the project.  The problem then becomes
> keeping it synched with the FreeBSD doc repository.
>
> I suggest we bring this to the list.  Perhaps there would be
> an interested doc committer who could fast-tract commits
> into HEAD if they were technically accurate or perhaps a
> Perforce project could be started; I don't know.  I guess
> setting-up our own repository would take care of
> communication.  As most of the new development is going into
> the kernel infrastructure and manpages we probably don't
> need to worry too much in staying synched with the official
> version of the FreeBSD Architecture Handbook.
>
> And just as a note I want to reaffirm that, for me, this is
> a longterm project requiring a significant amount of
> research.  I personally don't anticipate generating huge
> volumes of material in any one week.
>
> I think as well we will need a great deal of help from
> various kernel systems developers if we are to be sure our
> information is accurate.
>
> If you wouldn't mind, perhaps you could forward this to the
> freebsd-doc at freebsd.org mailing list with your original
> message intact so that we can receive some feedback from the
> community on how to best go about collaborating on this project.
>
> One of the most important issues for me is that everyone and
> anyone who desires to participate be able to do so.  The
> real strength of the FreeBSD project is the FreeBSD
> community.  Without that community no amount of individual
> technical achievement will be able to keep the FreeBSD
> project the vibrant entity it is today.
>
> Most Respectfully,
>
> Duane Whitty