I wanted to revitalize this thread as Bruno's proposed overhaul makes a lot of
sense. And it seems that everyone is agreed on this. I had a number of the
offline discussions with Sean, Jay, Roman and other guys (not singling out
these guys, but otherwise the list would be too long;)

I think we all are in agree that the high level scope does totally make sense
and all these guides are very important fr the success of the project.

What I want to discuss is the tools that we can use for it. As I see, a
requirement to be able to generate a PDF book to hand it out to a user is very
important.

I want to put upt to the discussion a list of choices that we have to do the
job. Once we are in consensus on the toolset/format we can move forward real
fast. The way I see it is that the following formats can be used:
 - docbookx (what HBase uses, XML base format)
 - markdown (a text based format without much overhead formatting)
 - asciidoc (similar to markdown, but somewhat different, I don't know much 
about it)
 - an online CMS system of some kind

I would like to see what you guys think about all this and what would be a
preferred way of generating/controlling/managing the versions of the
documentation.

Please chime in!

Thanks,
  Cos

On Sun, Dec 08, 2013 at 09:35PM, Bruno MahИ wrote:
> Hi,
>
> As you are all probably aware, documentation is not our forte.
> In order to help with that, I have been thinking about introducing books  
> similar to the Apache HBase reference guide.
> But given how wide is Apache Bigtop, having a single reference guide  
> would not make sense. So I have come up with 3 books:
> * User guide - hand hold users into installing and configuring an Apache  
> Bigtop installation. Including packages directly, puppet recipes and all  
> the system (users, locations, ec2...) and tooling around such  
> installation (firewall, monitoring, logging...)
> * Developer guide - All the inner details about contributing packages,  
> tests and customizing VMs and Apache Bigtop (build my own stack)
> * Cookbook - Step by step instructions to reach a given goal (run hive  
> queries with an hbase backend, logstash...)
>
> For now I will solely focus on the first one. I have prepared  
> BIGTOP-1157 to build an HTML and PDF version of the user guide as part  
> of our website.
> It is for now empty but here is a proposal for its content:
>
> * Preface
>
> * Introduction [What is Apache Bigtop and why should I care]
>
> * What is new in Apache Bigtop [features highlights]
>   ** What is new in Apache Bigtop 0.9.0
>      ** Upgrading from Apache Bigtop 0.8.0 to Apache Bigtop 0.9.0
>   ** What is new in Apache Bigtop 0.8.0
>      ** Upgrading from Apache Bigtop 0.7.0 to Apache Bigtop 0.8.0
>
> * What is an application and the need for packages [an application  
> neeeds users, files, configuration, permissions, ulimits, ports...]
>
> * Lifecycle of applications
>   ** Lifecycle of an application [init scripts, logs]
>   ** Lifecycle of a distributed application [coordination, zookeeper...]
>
> * GNU/Linux distributions supported by Apache Bigtop
>   ** centos[presentation, what makes it distinct, how to to main tasks  
> (install, upgrade, remove packages, restart services, tweak firewall,  
> where are logs...), setup bigtop repositories]
>   ** Fedora [presentation, what makes it distinct, how to to main tasks  
> (install, upgrade, remove packages, restart services, tweak firewall,  
> where are logs...), setup bigtop repositories]
>   ** OpenSUSE [presentation, what makes it distinct, how to to main  
> tasks (install, upgrade, remove packages, restart services, tweak  
> firewall, where are logs...), setup bigtop repositories]
>   ** Debian [presentation, what makes it distinct, how to to main tasks  
> (install, upgrade, remove packages, restart services, tweak firewall,  
> where are logs...), setup bigtop repositories]
>   ** Ubuntu [presentation, what makes it distinct, how to to main tasks  
> (install, upgrade, remove packages, restart services, tweak firewall,  
> where are logs...), setup bigtop repositories]
>
>
> for project in [Hadoop, HBase, Zookeeper, Flume...]:
> * Apache <project>
>   ** Introduction
>   ** Installation
>   ** Configuration
>       ** Pseudo distribution
>       ** Distributed
>       ** Security
>       ** Monitoring
>       ** Integration with Apache Hadoop
>       ** Integration with other project
>   ** Upgrade?
>   ** Life cycle (services)
>   ** Common issues
>
> =============================================================================
>
>
> Thoughts, help and ideas welcome!
>
>
> Thanks,
> Bruno

Reply via email to