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FreeBSD Documentation Project: Current projects

Here are the projects currently under way (or being actively contemplated on the freebsd-doc mailing list).

If you think you can contribute to any of these, please do not hesitate to stand up and be counted. You should talk to the person responsible for that particular project, who can then bring you up to speed on what is happening. If you have any ideas for a new project then please email FreeBSD-doc@FreeBSD.org.

• Documentation TODO list
• Open documentation problem reports
• Improve Handbook Index
• Contribute Advocacy Slides/Presentations
• Write a section in the Handbook and/or FAQ
• Write some new Papers
• CGI Scripts
• Multilingual Web scripts
• Translations of the FreeBSD Documentation
• Search engine enhancements

Documentation TODO list

The Documentation TODO list is an up-to-date list of documentation issues that should be resolved. This list is posted every month on the FreeBSD-doc@FreeBSD.org mailing list. If you wish to help us to improve the FreeBSD documentation set you should, at first, choose to work on one of the TODO list items.

Open documentation problem reports

Current FreeBSD problems reports are tracked using the GNATS database. You can view the open documentation problem reports.

Improve Handbook Index

Responsible: FreeBSD-doc <FreeBSD-doc@FreeBSD.org>

Synopsis: Many new sections have been added to the FreeBSD Handbook without index terms, others have been added under inappropriate primary or secondary indexterms that do not fit the existing scheme. Some indexterms have been added inside list items or other areas where they are not allowed by our stylesheets, causing ??? to be printed in the index instead of a real page number.

Index work requires experience and anyone who works on this task is highly encouraged to carefully read through the existing (print-output) index, and to have read the Chicago Manual of Style or other style books that deal with indexing. Please see the CVS history of some of the chapter.xml files to see some of the indexing errors that have been corrected in the past. It is imperative to view the PostScript version of the Handbook after making any changes to indexterms as many errors, such as long words or deeply nested indexterms will break the two column output there, or cause the page number to be listed as ???.

There is a script doc/share/misc/indexreport.pl which can be used to find areas of an SGML file where <indexterms> are sparse.

Contribute Advocacy Slides/Presentations

Responsible: FreeBSD-doc <FreeBSD-doc@FreeBSD.org>, Murray Stokely <murray@FreeBSD.org>

Synopsis: Presentations marked up in the DocBook-slides DTD have recently been added to the documentation set in doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/slides. More advocacy content is needed, and additional stylesheet work is needed to pull in content from the release notes and other XML content in our documentation set to build up-to-date slides with 'make'. A simple example presentation was committed with some of this functionality, but there is more work to be done! Also, the stylesheets for print/PDF output (using the Java based XSLT processors, PassiveTeX is too limiting for slides) could be improved as the default DocBook Slides XSL-FO stylesheets produce very spartan slides.

Write a section in the Handbook and/or FAQ

Responsible: No one

Synopsis: Chunks of the FAQ and Handbook have empty sections in them. They need filling. If you have just had to use one of these documents to complete a task, and found them lacking, please find the time to write up your experiences as a possible replacement.

Alternatively, if you have just had to do something that had no entry in the FAQ and/or Handbook, please consider writing a new section. Then submit it as outlined above.

Write some new Papers

The New SCSI layer for FreeBSD (CAM)

Responsible: <doc@FreeBSD.org>, <scsi@FreeBSD.org>

Synopsis: See The Design and Implementation of the FreeBSD SCSI Subsystem for a first snapshot.

CGI Scripts

Responsible: <doc@FreeBSD.org>, Wolfram Schneider <wosch@FreeBSD.org>

Synopsis: Modify the CGI scripts url.cgi, ports.cgi, pds.cgi and the script portindex to use the Perl FreeBSD::Ports modules. These modules also need thorough testing.

Multilingual Web scripts

Responsible: <doc@FreeBSD.org>

Synopsis:

Our main Web pages are written in (American) English. The FreeBSD Translations Projects translate the web pages, Handbook and FAQ to other languages.

We must translate the cgi scripts and web build scripts too. The scripts should support multiple languages, not only one. Most scripts are written in perl.

• Merge the perl scripts www/en/ports/portindex and www/ja/ports/portindex into one script. Add an option for English and Japanese output.

Translations of the FreeBSD Documentation

Responsible: <doc@FreeBSD.org>

Translate the FreeBSD documentation (Web pages, FAQ, Handbook, Manual pages) into other languages. See the FreeBSD translations projects

Search engine enhancements

Responsible:Eric Anderson <anderson@centtech.com>

When searching the website, the output from the search engine includes the filename that was found, which might be something like FAQ34.html.

It would be more useful if the results included the question text, allowing the user to see whether or not the result was relevant.