How to Participate in OpenSolaris Documentation
The OpenSolaris documentation community is a group of Sun writers and editors and community volunteers collaborating together to provide up-to-date technical information about using, managing, and developing on OpenSolaris.
Have an interest in writing, or do you have experience using OpenSolaris you could share with the rest of the community? Join the docs community. Here's how.
Ramp Up
There are several things you can do to get involved in the documentation community:
- Register for an OpenSolaris account: Sign up for an OpenSolaris account
- Subscribe to the docs-discuss mailing list. Just click subscribe in the following link and send the empty email that pops up: Documentation community discussion forum.
- Bookmark the docs-discuss forum: Documentation discussion forum.
- Review the Style Guide for OpenSolaris: Documentation Style Guide for OpenSolaris.
- Familiarize yourself with OpenSolaris open-source licensing: OpenSolaris documentation licensing.
Provide Inputs
Open-source communities thrive based on the open exchange of information and ideas. This is critical to a vibrant docs community, so jump in and help improve the docs by commenting, helping clarify technical accuracy and readability, and filing bugs. Here's how you can help:
- Leave a doc comment on the OpenSolaris Info Resources wiki: How to Leave Comments
- Review documents: Documentation Reviews
- File a doc bug or RFE: Reporting Bugs
Ready to Write?
When you're ready to write, there are a few things you need to do. First, all contributors to OpenSolaris need to sign a Sun Contributor Agreement (SCA). After you've done that, you'll need to determine what you want to work on and what format you want to work in. We have open-sourced docs in both wiki format (probably the easiest way to get started) and XML. (We provide Solbook 3.5 XML.) Use these resources to get going:
- Sign an SCA: Sun Contributor Agreement
- Choose your authoring environment:
- Author wiki-based docs. How to Contribute
- Author XML-based docs.
Current Open Sourced Documentation
Documentation Tools
Doc download center
XML Templates
Work With a Sponsor
Documentation sponsors work with the community to support the documentation that is needed for features, projects, bug fixes, and enhancements that integrate into OpenSolaris. We have identified experienced writers from the Solaris writer community who have backgrounds in man pages, system administration documentation, and developer documentation. They will monitor the docs-discuss mail list for questions and requests for assistance. To request a sponsor, send a request through the mail list. The documentation sponsors provide the following assistance:
- Sponsors provide the means for the OpenSolaris community to participate in OpenSolaris documentation.
- Sponsors assist writers within the OpenSolaris community.
- Sponsors field requests and questions from community members regarding Solaris documentation.
Feature Documentation Feature documentation for OpenSolaris includes the following:
- The OpenSolaris System Administration documentation collection
- The OpenSolaris Software Developer documentation collection
- The OpenSolaris Reference Manual (man page) documentation collection
- The OpenSolaris Info Resources wiki
The Information Products department within Sun encourages the community to contribute to the feature documentation. The long term goal is to open source all of the Solaris feature documentation.
Documentation Projects Existing OpenSolaris documentation projects include the following: