Re: Any serious production servers yet?

["Justin C. Sherrill" <justin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Thu, June 1, 2006 4:50 pm, Dave Hayes wrote:

> I don't agree with thinking like a marketeer, and I'm happy people on
> this project (especially Matt) think like engineers. Nevertheless it
> seems to me that the barrier to entry for novice users to DragonFly
> could be lowered considerably with a small amount of effort. I would
> assume the best place for a focused effort is in the documentaiton.
>
> So. What would it take to have a simple and concise set of commands
> any inexperienced adopter could easily apply to get a basic DFly
> system with X, gnome or KDE, and some basic applications?

Someone writing it is what it takes.  Like much open source documentation,
the handbook and other things are written in DocBook, which isn't too hard
to learn, but does present a slight barrier to entry.  Building the
handbook or similar things from CVS requires a multitude of applications
on your DragonFly system.  Jeremy C. Reed and I (and Hiten, early on), are
the only folks that have tackled it.

The wiki presents a nice alternative; it's much easier to add to.  It
doesn't easily allow for PDF or PS or whatever output like DocBook does. 
There was some discussion a few years back or so about moving the handbook
primarily into the wiki, which would make it easier to update but harder
to bring back into CVS.  (The end result was 'no')

If you want to write something up and put it in the wiki, that would be
great.  If you want to add something to the handbook or other documents in
CVS under doc/, you can write the plain text and I'll happily do the
conversion if you don't want to.  I've switched jobs, houses, and
(inadvertently) computers over the last year, so my docs output hasn't
been what I want it to be.

I completely 100% agree with you.  We need more docs that are easy and
quick.  Even if the Handbook was up to date and revised, it'd still be
quite the slog to get through.