Category: GNOME

I’m here in lovely Cambridge for the winter GNOME docs hackfest. This time, the docs team is sharing a room with the Developer Experience (DX) hackfest, which provides us with a great opportunity to reach out to GNOME developers for expert’s advice.

Yesterday, Christian Hergert presented a new GNOME IDE in development, called Builder:

Builder comes with a feature-rich text editor that can also be useful for documentation writers who often author documents in XML.

Cosimo Cecchi showed us some of the downstream changes the Endless team made to gnome-user-docs and gnome-getting-started-docs. For me, personally, the most interesting part was their feedback on the GNOME docs style and content. Endless seem to target their product to a slightly different customer, still, they appear to have data on their users that the upstream project lacks. The GNOME help suite, written by different authors and in different style over the course of many years, is actually targeted at multiple audiences, spanning from quite inexperienced desktop end-users to skilled users who need to troubleshoot VMs in GNOME Boxes.

Shaun McCance showcased some of the cool features of Ducktype, a new lightweight syntax for Mallard. Although still a work in progress, this new syntax brings to the world of Mallard docs the flexibility of formats such as AsciiDoc or Markdown, which are now gaining strong popularity in both the developer and technical communication communities.

The docs team focused on squashing the bugs filed against GNOME Help and application help, and on content improvements in different areas of the desktop documentation stack. Jim Campbell worked on changing the structure and layout of Files help. He also worked with Jana Svarova on VPN docs for the GNOME sysadmin guide. Jana went through the docs feedback ML archives, responding to user comments and filing new bugs. Kat worked on application help with Jim and fixed a couple of bugs in gnome-user-docs. I worked on triaging docs bugs, and then on reviewing and updating some parts of GNOME Help and the sysadmin guide.

I would like to thank Collabora for providing the venue and catering, Kat and Philip Withnall for running the hackfests, and the GNOME Foundation for sponsoring me.

It’s been great to see old and new faces from the community, now off to Brussels for FOSDEM, then back to Brno for DevConf!

This is a belated post on the Open Help Conference in Cincinnati, OH that I had the chance (thanks for sponsoring me, Red Hat!) to attend this year. It took place from June 14-15 at a nice venue provided by Garfield Suites Hotel. The Conference was followed by the GNOME Docs Sprint from June 16-18.

The Open Help Conference is much smaller in attendance than some of the large industry conferences for technical writers out there. This actually allows the attendees to actively participate in many talks and discussions, similarly to what you can usually experience at unconferences. It was the Conference’s primary focus on docs communities that made attending each of the sessions very relevant to those of us who work on open source documentation.

Along with people representing other open source companies and communities (this included Eric Shepherd from Mozilla or Michael Downey from OpenMRS), there were also two fellow Red Hatters attending (Rich Bowen and David King). We had quite a few people from GNOME Docs, too. The Conference was organized by Shaun McCance who did a fantastic job running the whole event as he found time not only to take care of the venue and catering, but also of the social events on both conference days that took place in his lovely hometown of Cincinnati. Thanks again, Shaun!

You can check #openhelp and Michael Downey’s excellent notes to learn more about the different talks and sessions held at OH.

Open Help Conference 2014 Hackfest

The Open Help Conference 2014 Hackfest followed an unwritten tradition in the GNOME Documentation Project of having two GNOME docs hackfests or sprints annually. Unlike the sprint held earlier this year in Norwich, UK where the team worked mostly on updating the user help for the upcoming GNOME 3.12 release, the Cincinnati hackfest focused on finishing the GNOME System Administration Guide. We managed to completely rework the overall structure of the guide and redesigned the index page for the guide, following the earlier design mockups prepared for GNOME Help by Allan Day.

The restructured System Administration Guide now features the following main groups of topics:

• User Settings (Lockdown, Pre-seed user defaults, Pre-seed email/calendar/groupware, Appearance, Setup)
• Login Settings (Appearance, Session, Management)
• Network (NetworkManager, etc.)
• Software (Apps, Extensions, Management)
• Troubleshooting / diagnosis

More details can be found on the Guide planning page.

Other things that caught my attention during the conference:

Duck Pages

Shaun’s plans for the future include an additional input format for Mallard-based documentation – so called Duck pages. A Duck page is essentially a plain text format based on Mallard XML that doesn’t use the often distracting XML syntax. Duck pages should make it easy to author single-sourced topic-based documentation with a Markdown or AsciiDoc-like syntax. Unlike Markdown and others, Duck pages aim to not only allow for quick creation of rich-formatted docs, but also to contain data necessary to integrate the document with the rest of your Mallard-based documents.

Blip

Shaun also presented another tool that he has been working on: Blip. It is a web application to monitor documentation projects that use SCM repositories. Some examples include:

• GNOME Docs
• OpenStack Docs

Blip lets you not only browse through individual modules in your documentation project, but it also mines data to present information about contributors, their commit or mailing list activity, and much more.

• An example of a project profile with complete data on branches, commits, authors, included documents, and more: Gnome User Documentation
• An example of of a user profile with personal stats: Shaun McCance

Today is the second day of the GNOME Documentation Hackfest 2014. A group of community documentation writers is here in rainy Norwich, UK to work on getting GNOME’s help updated for the upcoming 3.12 release.

Today I am going through the bugs filed against the system-admin-guide in gnome-user-docs, and putting together a list of topics that are not yet updated or covered in that guide. Andre already updated or closed many of the bugs (thanks, mate!), so the bug pile for the guide now looks slightly better.

There is also some not-yet-upstreamed system administration material written for GNOME 3.8 and RHEL7 Beta that we published as a part of RHEL7 Beta product documentation. Since the 3.8 upstream release, there have not been many major changes in terms of what we want to have covered in the GNOME system admin guide, so I will be syncing our downstream docs with the upstream guide and updating the docs as needed. The goal is to release a reasonably complete system administration guide for GNOME 3.12, mostly following the outline detailed on the original planning page.

The hackfest wiki page highlights some of the other areas that we plan to work on this week.

I would like to thank Kat & Dave for organizing the hackfest and letting us stay at theirs for the week. Thank you so much! I would also like to thank the University of East Anglia for providing the venue, and the GNOME Foundation for sponsoring me to be here.