Hello,
I'm pleased to see so much interest in a Bacula book and in the documentation.
Thanks.
Taking Andrew Ford's suggestion, I have created a new mailing list
"bacula-docs" for discussion of the documentation projects. This is a closed
list in the sense that you must subscribe to it in order to post to it. That
reduces administration and spam. You can subscribe to this list at:
http://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bacula-docs
It seems to me that there are three distinct projects here:
1. Writing a Bacula chapter for Curtis Preston's new book.
2. Writing a "Deploying Bacula" book.
3. Cleaning up and modifying the current Bacula documentation.
====
Here are my views on these subjects:
1. Writing a Bacula chapter for Curtis Preston's new book.
This is in good hands. Adam Thornton is working on it, and I
hope he will keep us posted on his progress on the bacula-docs list.
2. Writing a "Deploying Bacula" book.
This is a major project, and I was pleased to see how many of you are
interested in working on this. Your reflections on this subject made me
realize that my own time will be pretty limited for this project. I
believe what we need is one person who will undertake the project. That
person would work with the publisher and could be helped by anyone who wanted
to participate, but I'm not sure that it would be possible to have a coherent
book if the chapters were written by different people.
There were a number of suggestions to be our own publishers. Yes, this is
clearly possible, but then you need a person who understand writing,
publishing, and the audience. It seems to me that this is what publishers
like O'Reilly do very well.
Concerning royalites: this is a difficult subject that I know little about. My
main concern is to try to avoid any controversy, misunderstandings, or
divisions that always seem to arise when money is involved.
If one person really does take on the task and puts a *huge* effort into it
(as I imagine a book will requre), then it seems to me that person deserves a
percentage of the royalities, unless we find someone willing to do it as a
contribution to the project.
Some time ago when I considered a binary fee, Bacula users pointed me to
several articles indicating (convinced me) that paid developers in an Open
Software project tend to crowd out contributions. I fear the same may happen
here, so I'm hesitant about the idea of having a lot of people share in the
royalities. My desire for Bacula is to keep it open and free and to have
active free contributions to it. I think this subject should be clearly
resolved before we begin something.
3. Cleaning up and modifying the current Bacula documentation.
As Andrew pointed out the manual has grown by leaps and bounds. It is now so
big that it is not very well organized, making it hard to find important
information.
For some time, I have planned to separate the manual into a number of manuals.
This alone would improve it considerably -- an example is that recently, a
good part of the old manual was moved out into a developers manual. The
information in the developers manual is very important but only to a small
set of users. In addition, we should not forget that there is a separate
bacula-web manual, though at the current time, it is rather small.
My idea was to create the following from the current *giant* Bacula manual:
- An Installation manual
- A Tutorial
- A Configuration manual (how to setup a few standard
configurations).
- A Deployment manual (tips, tricks, case studies, FAQ,
problem resolution, performance, security, ...)
- A Reference Manual (description of all directives)
This is clearly open to discussion. The ones that I am pretty sure about the
Installation manual, the Tutorial, and the Reference manual.
Obviously I would be thrilled to have someone work on this (or several of you
-- proof readers and critics are always welcome). In any case, before the
next release, I will split out Installation and Tutorial manuals from the
current manual as I think this is relatively easy (they are mostly in
separate chapters already).
As always your comments pro/con and ideas would be appreciated.
--
Best regards,
Kern
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