Josh Saddler

Since my last post, I've mostly recovered from the H1N1 flu, which means that I've had more time to devote to our documentation and ever-growing pile of bugs.

I've made lots of extensive changes to our handbooks, desktop guides, and more in the last 24 hours. I've also gone on a serious bug-hunting spree. Documentation changes are pretty much always time-consuming. A single bug may require extensive edits of a dozen files or more, so trimming down the bug list by even one or two bugs can be very important.

I also added a new guide on LXDE to our repository, in the Desktop Resources category. Nate and Ben did a great job writing this guide, and getting the LXDE packages marked stable.

Since it's coming up on two years since 2008 (and thus the 2008.0 release), one thing I'd like to do is fix the rest of our handbooks to refer exclusively to the weekly autobuilds, rather than the deprecated 2008.0 media. Some time ago I fixed the AMD64 and x86 handbooks to use the weekly stages and CDs in time for the 10.0 release. However, as there were no other arches with 10.0 media, the exhaustive task of updating them wasn't as critical as our two biggest arches. Now, however, I'd like to get the rest done before the new year.

There's also a fair amount of new Portage documentation that needs to be written, to account for new features like ACCEPT_LICENSE, and I need to take another look at the section on block resolving. For the last few stable releases, Portage has an autoresolver that can take care of most minor blocks without requiring user intervention, unlike in the past, when all blocks required manually unmerging packages.

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In other doc news, I made the list of top open-source technical writers on the web. I've never heard of this site (or the list), and I don't even know how they found me. But I think Donnie Berkholz may have had something to do with it, so thanks to him and Shyam Mani for mentioning it to me.

Documentation is a collaborative effort -- even when writing new docs from scratch, you're always building on someone else's work. Every doc, patch, tip, trick, and conversation comes from previous efforts, and it paves the way for the next bit of writing. So thanks to all the folks who've contributed directly and indirectly to our documentation. You've made our stuff great!