This summer I’m taking part in COSS Summercode Finland 2007. I’ll be working on developing a man/info page wiki editor for the Fedora Project. The editor will be based on MoinMoin, the Python based wiki engine that is used by many Linux distributions and other open source projects. My mentor is Karsten Wade. I’ve also been in contact with the MoinMoin devs, thanks for your interest in my project 🙂
The main points in why we are doing this is as follows:
- To give the users an easy interface on browsing and searching Linux man/info pages
- To give clean URLs to man pages in a specific distribution so that those URLs can be used as reference in other documentation
- To let the users see the differences in the man/info pages of different distributions
But even more importantly:
- Give the users a chance to edit the man/info pages in a format many of them know already, a wiki
- This way they can influence easily on the documentation of the software they use daily
- Admins, editors, whichever you want to call them, could then check and maybe fix the edits and send them upstream after that. How this is going to be implemented exactly is still in the planning, but it could be just simple Bugzilla reports or maybe even proper patches that could be merged easily.
Some important links about my project:
COSS Main Page
Summercode Finland 2007
Summercode Finland FAQ
My project page at Fedora Wiki
My project page at MoinMoin Wiki
In this blog I will probably write about how my project is going and I’ll post some kind of weekly reports about my progress, that’s also something that the COSS people want us coders to do. I’m interested in hearing people’s comments about my project, you can contact me in the comments of this blog, in either of the two project wikis or by IRC, I’m vpv on Freenode. And yes, I do have email also, vpivaini AT cs NOSPAM helsinki fi.
I may have forgot to mention something worthwhile, but I’ll edit this post if I remember anything useful to add 🙂
P.S Fedora 7 was released yesterday, congrats everyone who made it happen! If you haven’t got it already, go get it 😉
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