Dear All,

After quite a few irc (#ldap) discussions with Howard and Quanah about the core docs, faq and man pages, I'd like to offer some thoughts on the way forward and offer my time to help (somewhat limited, as is everyone's). And, as I understand it from this years OpenLDAP conference, this is one of the devel teams goals anyway.

My end goal for OpenLDAP, is to have documentation that equals or surpasses the OpenLDAP software and setup a doc team to maintain it.

Q. So, who am I and why should you allow me to touch your docs?

A. We've commercially supported OpenLDAP for quite a while now (on your list since 2003), with lots of deployments (every one of our clients), so we hope we know the product. We also love documentation (weird, I know), and most of our contributions to the community (docs and code) can be seen at:

http://www.suretecsystems.com/opensource/

varing from Amanda docs to sitting on the "Fedora Documentation Steering Committee (FDSCo)"

Firstly, I'd like to get a page started on the FAQ system to track what we've got, from all the man pages to guides etc. Then list whats missing/needs improving. Also, a section for a wish list, which I see as finishing/extenfing the Admin Guide, Starting a devel guide, and maybe a User guide (using the tools with examples?) and a Roadmap to try and set some dates (nothing like deadlines ;-) ).

Task Summary to start with (not in order or importance):

Man Pages:

* Check what's missing and unfinished * Check for detail * Identify what could be pulled into the Admin Guide for more examples

Admin Guide:

* Pull in info regarding all the different Overlays, uses and examples * Pull in info regarding all the different backends, uses and examples * Finish monitoring section, based on "doc/guide/admin/monitoringslapd.sdf" * More discussion of Replication Scenarios, with complete examples * More in depth Quick start, maybe from install to replicated setup etc. * Extend Schema Section * Tuning section * Identify core good parts from FAQ, and bring into guide * Many more....

Devel Guide:

* Turn doc/devel/* into a guide * use servers/slapd/overlays/slapover.txt for info about all hooks/flow control of slapd etc. * Many more....

User Guide: * Identify if one is needed

I checked out the *sdfs a few weeks ago, and although most of my work is done in DocBook XML, SDF looks easy, converts well to PDF, which d-xml doesn't (more info about Fedora Tool-chain if needed), so I'm not proposing a conversation. Let's stick with defining and writing content.

When we get a good team together and have more docs, maybe OpenLDAP will stop being bashed about quality of docs and people will actually get on to contributing instead of whining.

You never know, people might read them before posting to the lists and save us all time in the long run!

Thanks for your time and look forward to your responses,

Gavin.