HOWTO section...

[kosmosik]

I've just wrote my first HOWTO here... I wonder if these documents (HOWTOs) are published some other way than this forum? I mean it would be great to have a script that f.e. every week will output HOWTOs stored here as a PDF book to download (f.e. versioning the book on each release) and to share this book to community. Of course such book should be well formated and pretty. But I think we can achieve it with LaTeX and gathering all required data from database in some XML form... I think it would be killer book.

Also if the articles are published on some kind of free licence/copyleft you (forum owners) can publish the book and make money from it (I would not mind if you do so - hosting and administering a site costs)! :)

[PeTzZz]

It's great idea in some way, but it would be huge management work and it takes a lot of bandwidth.

BTW these how-to's are useful only with comments, because they give some additions and people can see how it works. Cons are that comments aren't so well-formated and some of them may not be so suitable to publish. The other thing is that how-to section may contain not so helpful how-to's (ok, that doesn't matter so much) and if the process is automated then there may be published some unmoderated ones. Then offtopic ... As I said it is a huge management work.

The how-to section is standalone and so it is very helpful already. It should just be more visible to everyone. For example it may be linked on the link panel below the logo and maybe even in 'The Unofficial Fedora FAQ' and/or in some other places.

PeTzZz

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My View

[kosmosik]

It's great idea in some way, but it would be huge management work
if this forum is properly designed it will be some work but only once. content on web is same content in print in general so it would not be hard... but probably forum is not the best media for such things. wiki would be better. please give us wiki for HOWTOs...

and it takes a lot of bandwidth.
single PDF file (~2MB) downloaded once a month? not so much relly. you entering this site like 1000 times a day generate more bandwith than that. and what is the point of downloading the same file more than one time?

BTW these how-to's are useful only with comments, because they give some additions and people can see how it works. Cons are that comments aren't so well-formated and some of them may not be so suitable to publish. The other thing is that how-to section may contain not so helpful how-to's (ok, that doesn't matter so much) and if the process is automated then there may be published some unmoderated ones. Then offtopic ... As I said it is a huge management work.
that is why it should be wiki.

[ewdi]

we could probably work something out, we dont really have to worry abt bandwidth for now

[Jman]

Perhaps this could be on the Fedora Project wiki (http://fedoraproject.org/wiki).

Can we assume every howto is released under, say, the Free Documentation license?

[kosmosik]

well assumptions are not something legal :) are there any posting precautions? I mean there should be some copylefts or smth...

[crackers]

The copyright notice at the bottom of the page explicitly copyrights each post by the author (which would also be implied, if not stated directly). So, in order for this to work, you'd have to contact each and every author and get explicit permission. You cannot assume anything these days, sadly.

[Jman]

My how tos (such as they are) I release under the Free Documentation license (http://www.gnu.org/licenses/fdl.html). One author down, several to go. :p

Many of them will require some editing to get them into some kind of coherent state anyway. Good luck to whoever tries this.

Aspiring documentation editors can also check out the docs project (http://fedora.redhat.com/projects/docs/).