maria-developers team mailing list archive

[Daniel Bartholomew <dbart@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Wed, 12 Aug 2009 15:27:59 +0200, Kristian Nielsen
<knielsen@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Kristian> We are starting to add new features to MariaDB (that are not
Kristian> in MySQL), including user-visible features.
Kristian> 
Kristian> I think we need to decide now how we will handle keeping
Kristian> documentation for these new features.
Kristian> 
Kristian> There is an open issue about the MySQL documentation being
Kristian> non-free, and whether we can do anything about it. But until
Kristian> this is resolved, on way or the other, we still need
Kristian> somewhere to write documentation.
Kristian> 
Kristian> I think it is mainly about setting up a repository somewhere
Kristian> and start adding text. The important thing now is to get the
Kristian> content there, the presentation can be enhanced later. So we
Kristian> would have a manual "differences between MariaDB and MySQL"
Kristian> or something. If we have the content we can use it later in
Kristian> whatever form we need, if we omit adding the content now it
Kristian> is going to be really hard to figure out everything that's
Kristian> missing in a year or two.
Kristian> 
Kristian> Daniel, any suggestions for what format to use? Can we use
Kristian> the same format as the MySQL documentation (is it docbook or
Kristian> something, can't remember)?

The Knowledgebase documentation will use Creole markup, so that is what
I prefer. Creole is similar to MediaWiki/MoinMoin/wiki markup. There is
a cheat sheet on the markup available here:
http://wikicreole.org/wiki/CheatSheet

However, like you said, the important thing is to get content written
now, so if you are more comfortable and more productive using a
different markup (docbook, html, plain text, etc...), use it and I'll
worry about converting it into Creole for the Knowledgebase.

On the question of where to put the documentation . . . if we want a
shared repository for it, Launchpad is probably the natural place.

Kristian> Also, until we get procedures like at MySQL/Sun for a
Kristian> documentation team that ensures all features and bug fixes
Kristian> get documented, I think it is the responsibility of each
Kristian> developer that documentation gets added in the right place. I
Kristian> would really like to see us keeping the up the standard that
Kristian> everything in MySQL (now MariaDB) is documented.

I agree.

Thanks.

-- 
Daniel Bartholomew