First of all, thanks to everyone who participated in the doc discussion at the OpenSolaris summit in Santa Cruz (5/3-5/4). It was great meeting you and hearing from the proverbial horse's mouth what you think about OpenSolaris docs and the direction we should be heading.
More specifically...this is great input, Sriramn. Thanks for writing all of this down. We're always eager to hear from users with info like this. Barbara Lundquist, who co-authored the Gettign Started Guide along with Jyothi Srinath, has some detailed notes from the doc discussion at the summit that echo some of Sriramn's comments and others. Barbara, could you send those along to this thread? I've been trying to synthesize what I heard at the Summit and CommunityOne and related events, so I'd like to summarize a few thoughts, specifically with regard to OpenSolaris content. I've got a few bullets of high-level statements with a bit of commentary after each bullet. * Transfer knowledge from other OS users to the OpenSolaris user. As I heard it, we're talking about knowledgeable users here who know how to do things in Linux, or even Solaris. So, it would be helpful to tell them what's different about doing those things in OpenSolaris. The discussion focussed on system administration tasks, but I think we could extrapolate to include developers, too. In this discussion, folks mentioned both the need to compare/contrast tasks as well as map terminology where it differs from Linux -> OpenSolaris or Solaris -> OpenSolaris. (See Sriramn's inputs on specific docs of interest.) * Try to distill a set of common, required tasks and present in self-contained cookbook/recipe format. I take this to be a request for more modular doc components. There was discussion that this format would be easier to digest for students/professors, but I think there's some general interest in this approach. Folks seemed to like Problem Statement/Solution/Discussion format for presenting this info. There was also general belief that these would both simplify access for the user and would lower the barrier of entry for potential contributors. * Broaden the audience we're writing for. While we have a pretty advanced product, and there's a large population of experienced Solaris folk, there are new markets and target users who may not be steeped in the lore of Unix. As I recall, there were multiple calls for beginner documentation and simple explanations of things we might otherwise take for granted as experienced users. * Focus on migrating applications from Linux and Solaris to OpenSolaris. I think this comes in a couple of flavors. There's the software side...porting apps that currently run on Linux to OpenSolaris. And then there's a hardware component, since (in the Solaris case) this suggests porting from SPARC -> X86. I've got more, and there are other topics, especially with regard to nurturing community contributions, but will save those thoughts for another thread. -alan This message posted from opensolaris.org
