I've been through a few revisions of the following project proposal and I wanted to share it with all of you. Please reply with your comments or suggestions and let me know what you think, from both a documentation solution and an implementation perspective. I'm cross-posting to the OpenSolaris install forum for the latter.
I'm also attaching a diagram to help describe the project proposal. Thanks in advance, Paul Project Synopsis ----------------------- Provide the ability to dynamically create an index of information links from the Image Packages System IPS packages that are installed on an OpenSolaris system. This index will give users a customized, high-level list of links to help them find the appropriate information about the software that is installed on their system. Project Description -------------------------- Solaris documentation has always been delivered as a single, monolithic documentation set. Sun has never provided a way to dynamically create an information set based on the packages that are actually installed with the Solaris operating system. This problem of providing customized information is even more intensified with the new Image Packages System (IPS) software. With OpenSolaris, users now install the core operating system and then choose additional packages to install from the package depot server. This new installation paradigm enables more flexibility and very customized systems. And, because OpenSolaris development is now open to the community, the number of packages and features will continue to grow quickly. It will become increasingly difficult (if not impossible) to maintain a single documentation set that covers all the packages in the repository. And, even if that were possible, users will only want or need information for the packages that they have installed. This Dynamic Information Index project is meant to solve this problem by mirroring the customization of the IPS software. Through the use of a standardized installation script, each package will provide links to its associated documentation. As packages are installed on a system, their associated documentation links will be merged into a single index. So, after a system is installed with OpenSolaris, users can access a single index that enables them to find all the related information for the packages that are installed on their system. The index could include links to wikis, project pages, demos, BigAdmin, docs.sun.com, and other information types. Also, this index will be updated whenever the user installs additional packages in the future or updates to existing packages. In Phase 2, we could go beyond links and actually start to dynamically build documentation sets. This message posted from opensolaris.org -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: OpenSol_dynamic-index.png Type: image/png Size: 51328 bytes Desc: not available URL: <http://mail.opensolaris.org/pipermail/install-discuss/attachments/20080825/52faf8ab/attachment.png>
