[Lustre-devel] Seeking contributors for Lustre User Manual

[Dilger, Andreas]

In hopes of improving the quality, coverage, and currency of the Lustre
User Manual, I'm putting out a call to the Lustre community for
contributors to this important resource.

The user manual is especially important for new users to Lustre, but has
fallen into some disrepair now that there is no longer a dedicated
documentation writer for it.  As well, there are many sections of the
manual that have become outdated over the years (such as example output,
command descriptions, etc) that need to be refreshed.

The Lustre User Manual is also a component of Lustre that has a much
larger pool of potential contributors than the code itself.  If you want
to contribute to Lustre, but are not able to contribute with patches to
the code, then this is a great opportunity to help out.  If you benefit
from the open source development of Lustre, then contributing to the
manual is a chance to return something back to the community.  The Lustre
Manual is released under a Creative Commons license, so it is open to all
of us to improve.


While there is not currently a "todo" list for the areas of the manual
that need updating, looking through open LUDOC tickets is one option:

    
http://bugs.whamcloud.com/secure/QuickSearch.jspa?searchString=LUDOC%20open

There are a number of existing documentation tickets for features that are
under development for the Lustre 2.4 release (for which we expect to be
completed internally), but there are also some tickets from users pointing
out errors in the document that need to be fixed.

Another way to improve the manual is to simply fetch the manual and read
some section at random that you are either interested in, or have some
knowledge about, and see if any of the text is confusing, outdated, or
incorrect and needs to be updated.


The PDF and HTML versions of the current manual are available at:

    http://wiki.whamcloud.com/display/PUB/Documentation

The manual source is hosted in a Git/Gerrit repository in Docbook XML
format and can be downloaded at:

    git clone http://git.whamcloud.com/doc/manual lustre-manual

An account in Gerrit is required to download the manual and submit patches.

There are some wiki pages that describe the process and packages needed to
modify, build, and submit patches to the manual:

    
http://wiki.whamcloud.com/display/PUB/Making+changes+to+the+Lustre+Manual

Cheers, Andreas
--
Andreas Dilger
Lustre Software Architect
Intel Corporation