an offer to help with documentation

an offer to help with documentation

[randaL]

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While I have yet to install SELinux, I have spent considerable time pouring over all the material available online since first hearing of it on Slashdot.  I expect to have this accomplished by next week, or at least attempted several times <grin>.  What I have learned so far has excited me quite a bit, and I wish that my programming skills were up to par so that I could contribute... but that is likely to be several years down the road (if ever).  I feel that this is an important direction for Linux to grow, and commend the people who made the decision to bring this to the OpenSource Community (and of course the people who have worked to bring it to its current state).

It occurs to me that I may be able to offer assistance in developing the documentation.  This would necessitate my full understanding of the product as it continues to mature, and provide me with a firm basis on which to contribute to the code (should I ever develop my skills to that level).  It would provide focus.  Additionally, it could allow resources to be utilized more effectively.  Based on the description of content, I am not sure how I could be of immediate use to the project--I expect that I would need more time playing with the software--but I wanted to express my willingness to help as I am able.

>From the ToDo-page, I read the following:


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  Documentation Tasks
  In general the SEL team only works on these tasks to the extent they are necessary to describe the system to other researchers and developers or as time is available.

    a.. Create an Administrator Guidance Document 
    Discuss the use of Flask controls in various environment (ISP, Desktop, Firewall, etc.)

    b.. Create a User Guidance Document 
    What to expect as differences in SEL. Simple explanation of contexts and when they or their effects might be user visible.

    c.. Create an Application Developer Guidance Document 
    Discussion of how to create a policy snippet for an application. How and when to use the additional system calls. How to use for assured pipelines, etc.


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Who is in charge of documentation, and what is the current status of these documents.  What format(s) are being used (plaintext, html, latex)? What are the priorities -- their expected completion dates?  Is additional help still needed in this area?

regards,
Randal Hicks

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Re: an offer to help with documentation

[Stephen Smalley]

On Thu, 25 Oct 2001, randaL wrote:

> Who is in charge of documentation, and what is the current status of
> these documents.  What format(s) are being used (plaintext, html,
> latex)?
> What are the priorities -- their expected completion dates?  Is
> additional help still needed in this area?

I don't think that these documents have been started, although much of the
necessary information is already available in some form in the existing
papers and technical reports.  The original technical reports and papers
were written using LaTeX, but we are now using DocBook SGML to write
documentation for the LSM-based SELinux security module, as recommended by
the Linux Documentation Project (http://www.linuxdoc.org).  This format is
being used for newer Linux kernel documentation (see
the files in Documentation/DocBook) in the kernel tree.

--
Stephen D. Smalley, NAI Labs
ssmalley@nai.com




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