[libvirt] ANNOUNCE: Starting a libvirt application developer guide effort

This is a quick mail to announce that we have started an effort to write a libvirt application developer guide. The guide is intended to introduce programmers to the libvirt API and its concepts and demonstrate best practice along the way. The initial focus is on the C API, but once that's matured, further info on language bindings can be added. As is common with all work done in the libvirt project, the guide is being made available under an open license, specifically the Creative Commons Attribution–Share Alike 3.0 Unported license ("CC-BY-SA") The reason for this choice is that it has become the defacto license choice for documentation under Fedora, GNOME, and content from Wikipedia, etc.[1] The application developer guide is written in DocBook and is processed using the Publican toolset to generate the HTML and PDF output. Again this choice was made because it is the same toolset used in Fedora & Red Hat docs NB, this is using Publican 1.x series of releases which is available starting in Fedora 12 or later. The build config/styling is not compatible with the older Public 0.x series from earlier Fedora. There are two new GIT repositories for this work - A repository containing the libvirt brand. This is essentially CSS and graphics required to make the docs use the same style as the libvirt website does http://libvirt.org/git/?p=libvirt-publican.git - A repository containing the application developer doc. This is the actual interesting content. http://libvirt.org/git/?p=libvirt-appdev-guide.git Assuming you have Publican >= 1.0 installed, then the first step is to build and install the libvirt brand. This involves getting a checkout of the libvirt-publican.git repo, typing 'make rpm' and then installing the RPM it generates. Once the brand is installed, then you can get a checkout of the actual docs from 'libvirt-appdev-guide.git'. The content is all under the directory en-US/ in docbook format. To generate html, from the top level directory just type 'make html', likewise pdfs with 'make pdf'. If you just type 'make' you get html and pdfs. I have put up example copies generated from current available content http://berrange.fedorapeople.org/libvirt/appdev-guide/html/ http://berrange.fedorapeople.org/libvirt/appdev-guide/pdf/ If you look at these, you'll notice of course that while there is a nice big table of contents, most of the actual content is missing. We are continuing to write content and will update it periodically. If anyone is interested in contributing content, then simply send patches against the docbook XML in the libvirt-appdev-guide.git to this list as per the normal review & commit process. Regards, Daniel [1] http://iquaid.org/2009/07/06/why-relicense-fedora-documentation-and-wiki-... -- |: Red Hat, Engineering, London -o- http://people.redhat.com/berrange/ :| |: http://libvirt.org -o- http://virt-manager.org -o- http://ovirt.org :| |: http://autobuild.org -o- http://search.cpan.org/~danberr/ :| |: GnuPG: 7D3B9505 -o- F3C9 553F A1DA 4AC2 5648 23C1 B3DF F742 7D3B 9505 :|