[wildfly-dev] One Doc to Rule Them All

[Brian Stansberry]

So what are we going to do about this?

We’ve now reached the point where we need to start generating documentation for WildFly 11. And we’re beginning to require devs, at least those working for Red Hat, to write some sort of community doc as part of getting RFEs resolved. So docs infrastructure issue are beginning to impact our ability to get code changes in.

My 2 cents: an asciidoctor and git based approach sounds good, but unless we have resources available to make it happen quickly basically starting from today, we need to devise a strategy based on continuing to use confluence.

The biggest problem I saw in James’ original post was "Links take you to old documentation, e.g. a WFLY10 doc takes you to a page for WFLY8.” If that’s an inherent problem in cloning docs it’s hard to deal with. Having a living document isn’t so hard; you just write as if it’s a living doc and say things like “Since WildFly 10” etc. But if you can’t snapshot the living doc for a release without creating a lot of bad links, that’s a problem.

> On May 12, 2016, at 10:32 PM, James Perkins <jperkins at redhat.com> wrote:
> 
> I've been reading the WildFly documentation [1] quite a bit lately and noticing a lot of issues. Sometimes it references WildFly 8 in the WildFly 10 (or 9) documentation. Sometimes it references JBoss AS 7. Links take you to old documentation, e.g. a WFLY10 doc takes you to a page for WFLY8. Sometimes documentation is just plain out of date referencing behavior that has possibly been removed or replaced by something better.
> 
> This has happened because we keep copying the documentation over each time we have a new version. Overall this makes sense as a lot of it doesn't need to be changed. However it leaves reading the documentation confusing. Reading documentation for WildFly 10 and seeing WildFly 8 in the text with a link for AS72 isn't very user friendly as I'm sure we can all agree.
> 
> There's a few different ways we could go with this.
> 
> Approach 1:
> One, probably the easiest, is to use a single confluence project. We'd need to remove the version numbers from the text, which I think we should do anyway. Instead of referencing WildFly 10 we just reference it as WildFly.
> 
> An issue I can think of with this approach is some how annotating or referencing that parts of the documentation only work with ${version}. For example new features would have to be noted they only work with ${version}+.
> 
> 
> Approach 2:
> Essentially he same as approach 1 only do allow different Confluence projects for the different Java EE target version. So WIldFly 8, 9 and 10 would all be documented under something like WFLYEE7.
> 
> Approach 3
> Switch to using something like asciidoc which can use variables and generate links to the correct content. While this approach is probably takes the most work up front, it seems like like it would be easier to maintain between releases.
> 
> Any other suggestions are welcome.
> 
> [1]: https://docs.jboss.org/author/display/WFLY10/Documentation <https://docs.jboss.org/author/display/WFLY10/Documentation>
> 
> -- 
> James R. Perkins
> JBoss by Red Hat
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-- 
Brian Stansberry
Manager, Senior Principal Software Engineer
JBoss by Red Hat



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