SVOSUG (April notes)
At the Silicon Valley OpenSolaris User Group April '07 meeting, Brendan Gregg talked about the DTrace Topics project. This is a collaborative documentation project for DTrace. So, of course, as a writer, doc community leader, and infogeek, I loved this talk.
Brendan went on for 3+ hours and I would have stayed longer yet. He is so keen on documentation, that I just want to soak up his experiences and knowledge and sensibilities until they are my own. He also has a great sense of humor and appreciates Star Wars, so that doesn't hurt.
I let him know about the latest update to the Solaris DTrace Guide and offered help to update his DTrace toolkit with link targets when he finds an appropriate SPARC box to hook up the HD where it is all patiently waiting for his attention post-overseas-move. Hopefully the docs.sun.com hardware update is complete by then because the slowness is insanity right now. But, we did see the first interface update of the site in 5+ years last week, so my hope are high, thank you dot sun!! Brendan then had some threads on docs-discuss on opensolaris, where we're getting started on some cheatsheet documentation, and we had a chance to talk again in person at JavaOne.
I mentioned that we should get the DTrace toolkit included on the Starter Kit in future. That would totally rock. As an aside, I'm all stoked because I initialized a Mercurial workspace for the Starter Kit project late on Friday, so I should have it populated as soon as I get a README together. Mercurial just works and that is very cool, being a program manager all year (read:slideware hell), it felt really good to have a live workspace even if the only output is 0changes 0files 0diffs.
Currently, Brendan, me and few others are having a separate thread about wikis and how to get all the good doc collaboration from solaris internals and genunix.org consolidated on opensolaris.org wiki. We'll have to start small with regard to features for this new wiki, but we'll have all the basics covered and we can build out the fancier conversion and processing functions as we grow it.
