On Sun, Jun 8, 2025 at 7:37 PM Rich Persaud <pers...@gmail.com> wrote:

> On Jun 8, 2025, at 5:49 AM, Christopher Clark <
> christopher.w.cl...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> 
>
> On Wed, Jun 4, 2025 at 5:14 PM Jason Andryuk <jason.andr...@amd.com>
> wrote:
>
>>
>> I think this should be dropped.  We don't need a link to a design
>> document without an implementation.  You can add it once you've
>> upstreamed the implementation.
>>
>
> OK, I'll remove this section for the next version of the series.
>
>
> What's the recommended location of Xen design documents, requirements for
> future improvements, roadmaps or pointers to related work in adjacent
> open-source communities? The Xen wiki is being deprecated.
>

Others CCd are likely better qualified than I to answer these (reasonable)
questions, and I am interested to learn from any further answers.

My preferred option is not to deprecate the wiki, or at least not without a
replacement for it. I have found the wiki to be useful for many years for
both publishing technical content and for access to helpful material not
available anywhere else, even if the contents are rougher than the formal
documentation. Its accessibility is an essential part of enabling that.

If the wiki is deprecated, the available alternatives appear to be:

* Pursuing formal acceptance of documents into one of the Xen git
repositories;
>From my experience of doing so, less documentation will be produced if this
is the standard required and unique knowledge will be lost at an ongoing
cost to both the developer community and users of Xen. Review capacity is
already scarce and this will further deplete that.

* Publishing on the platforms of adjacent communities;
Documentation will be less discoverable and at the mercy of external tools
and processes, again at a cost to collaboration within the Xen community.

* Repurposing the Xen issue tracker
This would be a horrible bodge. Please no.

* Self-hosting - similar to publishing in an adjacent community, but worse
I would prefer not to have to do this and may not have time available to
do so. Not everyone is able to.

* Replace the wiki with another collaboratively-edited document hosting
platform
I am open to learning more about options for this if it is the recommended
direction.


> What's the recommended way for the Xen community to discover the existence
> of Argo documentation that is not hosted by the Xen community? If
> necessary, we can create a new semantic label or Xen docs directory tree,
> to host technical content that might otherwise be lost.
>
> Should we add a sentence to Xen's Argo documentation, to the effect of
> "Please refer to the Xen [wiki in archive.org, website, mailing list],
> external sites [A, B, C, D], or your preferred [search engine, LLM] for
> more technical documents on Argo design and implementation"?
>

The Virtio & Argo design documents, produced within an adjacent community
so they are hosted there, are relevant to Xen and ought to be enabled to be
discoverable (and if necessary hostable) via Xen community platforms.
They are also a single instance of a general class: there will be
developments of other Xen-related features within XCP-ng, Qubes and Linaro
projects - and other adjacent communities - that also warrant description
and linking from within Xen community documentation.

To Jason's review point: I am willing to accept leaving the VirtIO section
out of this specific Argo feature document but I do need an appropriate
alternative place for it - eg. the Argo design document (already within the
Xen source tree) could be extended to introduce it instead. The externally
referenced design documents are part of how such future
features get implemented, so referencing prior to implementation is helpful
and supportive of the continued development of the technology.

Christopher

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