SeasonOfDocs

Yocto Project Season of Docs

About

The Yocto Project is an open-source project that delivers a set of tools that create operating system images for embedded Linux systems. The Yocto Project tools are based on the OpenEmbedded (OE) project, which uses the BitBake build tool, to construct complete Linux images. BitBake and OE are combined to form a reference build host known as Poky which includes the following core components. This video will help explain what it's all about.

Richard Purdie, the Yocto Project's lead developer and Linux Foundation Fellow, considers documentation to be one of the cornerstones of this project. One of the very first members of that team to work on what became the Yocto Project 10 years ago was Scott Rifenbark, the project's tech writer. Sadly, Scott passed away early this year.

Ideas

Format Overhaul

Currently the project's documentation is written in docbook, which is a natural choice for a documentation writer, but less so for, say, a developer. To make it as easy as possible for everyone to contribute to the documentation going forward, it would be a good time to convert the raw format of the documentation into a more modern format that is easier to learn. Hopefully this will encourage people who don't usually write project documentation to submit patches and updates.

One Voice

Previously the project's documentation was written with one voice. Contributors would suggest updates, and Scott would make sure the flow had a certain uniformity; as though it had all been written in one go, by one person. Moving forward, it's likely the project's documentation updates will likely come from many contributors. It would be great to have someone review the current documentation and future updates with an eye towards maintaining one voice.

Organization

Currently the project's documentation is spread out in several places and formats. There are a number of manuals, some tutorials, a collection of wiki pages, and more. It would be great to see all this information collected together and organized in such a way as to make it easier for people new or experienced with the project to find exactly what they're looking for, quickly. Classify all existing documentation according to various attributes to identify areas that have weak or missing documentation. Fill any gaps in the documentation by creating new docs targeting specific users, tasks, or experience levels; or help motivate the right people to help generate the content. Work with the project's webmaster to present a unified location for all documentation.