Minutes from SIG: Documentation meeting on 2024-05-04

Attendees:

  • minion (Skyler Grey)
  • 8bitbuddhist (Andre)
  • Axel (Abhiram)
  • dfh (Olly)
  • coded (Samuel Shuert)
  • srxl (Ruby Iris Juric)
  • nova
  • isabel
  • srxl (Ruby Juric)
  • c8h4 (Christoph)
  • imadnyc (Abdullah Imad)

Agenda

  • Introductions
  • Leadership election
    • [Abdullah] Too small to do leadership now, maybe we should push back leadership until stage 2
    • [coded] Someone needs to get things moving, hold permissions
    • [srxl] Informal stuff has been working decently, we can’t leave it like this forever but for now this is fine… the need is not particularly pressing
    • [jakehamilton] One reason we were talking about this was doing administrative work. Having permissioned people to take care of that was the consideration here
    • [dfh] I wondered if we should promote coded and minion
    • [jakehamilton] Sure, this isn’t permanent
    • [minion] Excellent, in that case let’s kick the can later down the roadmap…
  • Software
    • [Abdullah] let’s get something up-and-running
    • [Axel] we need an “aux book” and a separate wiki that is dedicated to wiki
      • [Axel] for wiki, mediawiki may be the way to go
    • [Abdullah] I wonder if we should have the book just be another thing on the wiki
    • [dfh] What if we start by committing to a format … it seemed reasonable because of pandoc, support, etc.
      • The visualization ties into how people “enjoy” the content
      • I care about a universal format, not the software
    • [jakehamilton] Could we look at MDN (MDN Web Docs) as an example?
      • [srxl] They have markdown + custom templating separation
      • [minion] Let’s get started, on wiki.js, and then move it out later
      • [jakehamilton+srxl] agreed, it’s important to run in a portable format!
  • Infra
    • [jakehamilton] I’m running everything on DO out-of-pocket
      • [Axel] we can surely do cheaper than DO… Hetzner costs a fraction of the price
      • [dfh] vpsfree.cz / vpsfree.org gives you beefier machines for a pretty cheap price. I’ve done a comparison Hetzner/vpsfree, vpsfree wins on the resources per euro metric.
    • [jakehamilton] It would be fine to set up something on Clicks if we want to just be scrappy…
    • AI @minion, @coded should set up wiki.js
    • [Axel] Hydra?
      • [minion] This is off-topic, let’s have an infra call at some other time
  • Translation
    • [minion] Shall we use weblate?
    • [dfh] I like the idea, maybe we could do this in a little while, I could do translation in the git editor
    • [srxl] We want it to be something that we can move to a nontechnical thing. Having knowing git as a bar would exclude a good few people…
    • AI @minion, look at wiki.js support for localization
  • Any other business
    • [Abdullah]
      • We should have a board for tracking tasks
      • github? plane.so?
        • would be nice to avoid lock-in
        • [Ruby] the Nix monorepo is super easy for GitHub, but it’s maybe harder to know where to stick issues in that case
    • [dfh] Security story came up in security committee meeting, would it make sense to have a “Documentation story”
      • “we’re going to figure out tools that let us create interoperable stuff in the short term, then we’ll figure out other things later”
      • story? guiding principles?
    • [coded] having a dedicated “want to contribute”? page is a good idea
    • [minion] Is docs a SIG or a committee?
      • [Abdullah] let’s wait until it gets bigger… right now we don’t have to decide but maybe in the future we should choose to have more of a committee structure
      • [jakehamilton] Right now we’re operating more as a SIG… the way we could tell is “do we need that alignment between different SIGs on the direction of docs”?
      • [dfh] Would like to see a documentation committee that sets standards for documentation best practices and offloading some of the requirements from other SIGs/ commmittees
      • [Abdullah] how do we coordinate?
        • [jakehamilton] You talk to them, they talk to you! It would be great to have an office hours for people to attend, for example. Communication, I think, is the answer
        • [Abdullah] I’m worried that the programmers are gonna program and avoid documenting
        • [nova] Could we have a docs liason?
          • [coded] Maybe this is a good call for later?
    • [isabel] What’s the python program?
      • [minion] It was to declaratively manage committee things
      • [jakehamilton] We’re modelling this after the k8s things
    • Standardization of repo names
      • [jakehamilton] For repository names, let’s use kebab case. Don’t use kebab case in nix! In nix, let’s standardize on snake case
      • [minion] Let’s standardize on a thing
      • [jakehamilton] As a tip: bind shift+space to underscore

Decisions

  • Next meeting will be at the same time next week! Recurring meeting seems a good call
  • Kebab case for repo names
  • AI: @axel to setup Nextcloud for a shared calendar
  • @minion and @coded to be leaders for the time being, kick the election can down the road(map)
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