[Gluster-devel] [gluster-devel] Documentation Tooling Review

[Amye Scavarda]

On Tue, Aug 23, 2016 at 4:42 PM, Joe Julian <joe at julianfamily.org> wrote:

>
>
> On 08/23/2016 12:27 PM, Justin Clift wrote:
>
>> On 11 Aug 2016, at 21:23, Amye Scavarda <amye at redhat.com> wrote:
>>
>>> The Red Hat Gluster Storage documentation team and I had a conversation
>>> about how we can our upstream documentation more consistent and improved
>>> for our users, and they're willing to work with us to find where the
>>> major
>>> gaps are in our documentation. This is awesome! But it's going to take
>>> some
>>> work on our side to make this a reality.
>>>
>>> One piece that's come up is that we should probably look towards changing
>>> current tooling for this. It turns out that our ReadTheDocs instance
>>> search
>>> is failing because we're using markdown, and this is a known issue. It
>>> doesn't look like it's going to be fixed anytime soon.
>>>
>>> Rather than continue to try to make RTD serve our needs, I'd like to
>>> propose the following changes to where our documentation lives and in
>>> what
>>> language:
>>> I'd much rather pattern after docs.openshift.org, move to ASCIIdoc and
>>> use
>>> ASCIIbinder as our engine to power this. What that does is give us
>>> control
>>> over our overall infrastructure underneath our documentation, maintain
>>> our
>>> existing git workflow for adding to documentation, and matches with other
>>> communities that we work closely with. I'm mindful that there's a burden
>>> of
>>> migration again, but we'll be able to resolve a lot of the challenges we
>>> have with documentation currently: more control over layout, ability to
>>> change the structure to make it more user friendly, use our own search
>>> however we see fit.
>>>
>>> I'm happy to take comments on this proposal. Over the next week, I'll be
>>> reviewing the level of effort it would take to migrate to ASCIIdocs and
>>> ASCIIbinder, with the goal being to have this in place by end of
>>> September.
>>>
>>> Thoughts?
>>>
>> It's probably worth considering GitBook instead:
>>
>>    https://www.gitbook.com
>>
>> Example here:
>>
>>    http://tutorial.djangogirls.org/en/index.html
>>
>> Pros:
>>
>>    * Works with Markdown & ASCIIdoc
>>
>>      No need to convert the existing docs to a new format,
>>      and the already learned Markdown skills don't need relearning
>>
>>    * Also fully Open Source
>>
>>      https://github.com/GitbookIO/gitbook/
>>
>>    * Searching works very well
>>
>>      Try searching on the Django Girls tutorial above for "Python".
>>
>>      Correct results are returned in small fractions of a second.
>>
>>    * Has well developed plugins to enable things like inline
>>      videos, interactive exercises (and more)
>>
>>      https://plugins.gitbook.com
>>
>>    * Can be self hosted, or hosted on the GitBooks infrastructure
>>
>>    * Doesn't require Ruby, unlike ASCIIbinder which is written
>>      in it.
>>
>> Cons:
>>
>>    * It's written in Node.js instead
>>
>>      Not sure that's any better than Ruby
>>
>> It seems a better polished solution than docs.openshift.org is using,
>> and would probably require less effort for the Gluster docs to be adapted
>> to.
>>
>> Thoughts? :)
>>
>> + Justin
>>
>> +1 This seems like the most sane solution
>
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I'll jump back in here:
https://github.com/gluster/glusterdocs/pulse/monthly shows not a ton of
activity currently, as Humble pointed to earlier. That's not a bad thing,
but this may speak to Niels' point that contributing to Docs isn't
something that's currently well known.

My sense is that we should separate this into two different conversations:
improving the user + admin guides with contributions from the Red Hat
Gluster Storage team, and the second conversation about how we take
developer contribution. That gets Gluster.org back to a place where we can
contribute the developer guides with what's under active development.

Unfortunately, the tooling part is where we start with this, because the
contribution of the actively maintained documentation also depends on
ascii. As soon as I have a link to a proof of concept for what ASCIIdocs +
asciibinder could look like, I'll post it here for review.

My goal in pushing this is to get us to a place where we're contributing
the things that we know best, the features we're actively working on, and
how to help contribute to the project, while using the resources we have to
improve the user experience.

-- 
Amye Scavarda | amye at redhat.com | Gluster Community Lead
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