Welcome to the FreeBSD Documentation Project. Good quality documentation is very important to the success of FreeBSD, and the FreeBSD Documentation Project (FDP) is how a lot of that documentation is produced. Your contributions are very valuable.
This document's main purpose is to clearly explain how the FDP is organized, how to write and submit documentation to the FDP, and how to effectively use the tools available to you when writing documentation.
Everyone is welcome to join the FDP. There is no minimum membership requirement, no quota of documentation you need to produce per month. All you need to do is subscribe to the FreeBSD documentation project mailing list.
After you have finished reading this document you should:
Know which documentation is maintained by the FDP.
Be able to read and understand the XML source code for the documentation maintained by the FDP.
Be able to make changes to the documentation.
Be able to submit your changes back for review and eventual inclusion in the FreeBSD documentation.
The FDP is responsible for four categories of FreeBSD documentation.
The English language system manual pages are not written by the FDP, as they are part of the base system. However, the FDP can (and has) re-worded parts of existing manual pages to make them clearer, or to correct inaccuracies.
The translation teams are responsible for translating the system manual pages into different languages. These translations are kept within the FDP.
The FAQ aims to address (in short question and answer format) questions that are asked, or should be asked, on the various mailing lists and newsgroups devoted to FreeBSD. The format does not permit long and comprehensive answers.
The Handbook aims to be the comprehensive on-line resource and reference for FreeBSD users.
This is the main FreeBSD presence on the World Wide Web, visible at http://www.FreeBSD.org/ and many mirrors around the world. The web site is many people's first exposure to FreeBSD.
The documentation for the web site, FreeBSD Handbook, and FAQ are available in the doc/ Subversion repository, which is located at svn://svn.FreeBSD.org/doc/.
Manual pages are available in the src/ Subversion repository, which is available at svn://svn.FreeBSD.org/base/.
This means that the logs of changes to these files are visible to anyone, and anyone can use svn to view the changes.
In addition, many people have written tutorials or other web sites relating to FreeBSD. Some of these are stored in the Subversion repository as well (where the author has agreed to this). In other cases the author has decided to keep his documentation separate from the main FreeBSD repository. The FDP endeavors to provide links to as much of this documentation as possible.