Re: [Ksummit-discuss] [TECH TOPIC] Documentation

Shuah Khan
2019-06-14T21:40:29Z

On 6/13/19 8:25 AM, Mauro Carvalho Chehab wrote:
> Em Wed, 12 Jun 2019 12:22:55 -0600
> Shuah Khan <skhan@linuxfoundation.org> escreveu:
>
>> On 6/12/19 8:54 AM, Jonathan Corbet wrote:
>>> What could be more fun than talking about kernel documentation? Things we
>>> could get into:
>>>
>>> - The state of the RST transition, what remains to be done, whether it's
>>> all just useless churn that makes the documentation worse, etc.
>>>
>>> - Things we'd like to improve in the documentation toolchain.
>>>
>>> - Overall organization of Documentation/ and moving docs when the need
>>> arises. It seems I end up fighting about this more than just about
>>> anything else, but I think it's important to organize our docs for the
>>> convenience of the people using them.
>>>
>>> - The ultimate vision for kernel docs (for now). RST conversion and
>>> imposing some organization are important, but they will not,
>>> themselves, give us a coherent set of documentation. What can we do to
>>> have documentation that is useful, current, and maintainable, rather
>>> than the dusty attic we have now?
>>>
>>
>> The first step is identifying the ones that are out of date and/or
>> incorrect. I think this is probably the most time consuming part
>> and the second is start updating.
>
> I would do just the opposite: convert the documentation, then
> update it.
>

Yes. That is fine. I am referring to the outdated part. Converting
and updating them would work just fine.

> The reason is that, when someone sends a patch to the documentation,
> people tend to look more closely on it, and we start receiving
> updates for it.
>

> Ok, this doesn't happen every time, but it is still worth.
>
> There's another thing to consider here: there are lots of docs
> written for "stable" subsystems, in the sense that the documented
> code doesn't change for a lot of time (except for trivial patches
> not directly related to it.
>
> While doing large chunks of code conversion, I noticed that there
> are lots of still valid documents that fit on this.
>
> There's a big issue with those "stable" subsystems: they tend
> to not have any active maintainer anymore. So, there are not
> much people that are willing to actively review patches to it.
>
> So, my advice here is to really invert things:
>
> - do the conversion;

Even this can be made into tasks. If you would like to experiment
with and see how it works, send me a list of documents that you
would like to see converted first.

> - find a good place to put the converted the book;
> - add kernel-doc markups to be sure that the symbols will always
> match upstream;
> - review the remaining content of the docs.
>
>> I am currently putting together a task list for mentorship program
>> with a goal to create tasks that would more meaningful and helpful
>> instead of whitespace patches.
>>
>> I will gladly add documentation tasks to the list to help improve
>> the documentation.
>
> I can surely mentor people interested on doing such tasks.
>

That will be great.

thanks,
-- Shuah