+1 from me, anything to make updating Docs easier has to be a positive

Regards

Geoff Higginbottom

D: +44 20 3603 0542 | S: +44 20 3603 0540 | M: +447968161581

geoff.higginbot...@shapeblue.com

-----Original Message-----
From: sebgoa [mailto:run...@gmail.com]
Sent: 09 December 2013 11:54
To: dev@cloudstack.apache.org
Cc: Radhika Puthiyetath; msweet....@gmail.com; Mike Tutkowski
Subject: [DISCUSS][PROPOSAL] Move docs to .rst format and readthedocs

Hi,

There has been lots of discussion about docs over the last 3/4 months, in 
summary the issues are:

-Difficult to maintain and keep website up to date (issues with lang and issues 
with pdf formatting lately) -Difficult to contribute to easily, docbook is fine 
but tedious to work on.
-Errors in the docs don't get properly fixed -Mix of OS information -Lack of 
content for certain features -Docs release cycle. Docs have bugs that will 
never get fixed in that specific release (because we see it as code release)

To remedy some of those issues and work on a new release process specific to 
docs we moved the docs to its own repo:

https://git-wip-us.apache.org/repos/asf?p=cloudstack-docs.git

*I propose that we move away from docbook and use a more readable format: 
restructuredtext*

I have worked on a prototype that uses restructured text:
http://docutils.sourceforge.net/rst.html

This format makes it extremely easy to write docs. Existing docbook content 
could be converted to .rst using a tool like pandoc:
http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/

*In addition to changing the format I propose that we use readthedocs.org*

This will help with the release and build of the docs. readthedocs grabs the 
docs from a git repo, builds html, pdf and epub.
It can also maintain several releases. We can apply a specific -theme- to our 
docs.

See a prototype here:

http://cloudstack.readthedocs.org/en/latest/

*I propose that we move to this as early as 4.3 documentation*

Assuming this proposal passes, we would need to:

-re-architect the repo
-create the proper cnames to be in accordance with trademark guidelines -we can 
decide what content to keep or not and convert what we keep.
-decide how we organize the content
-start accepting pull requests (noting that pages can be edited directly from 
github) -make a first release of this new doc site at the same time than 4.3 
release.


Thoughts, flames ?


-Sebastien
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