8:13 p.m.
Recently the community discovered that the Podman
Whatis?(https://podman.io/whatis.html) page had badly lagged behind the
reality of Podman. For example, the page talked about the
soon-to-be-released REST API (released a few months ago), and other
upcoming features that were already in play. Additionally, over the
past few months, inquiries have been made over the availability of
several documents: specific "how-to's", a user guide, rootless container
tutorials, networking tutorials, and a few issues have been lodged
against various parts of the existing documentation.
The maintainers of Podman have recognized that the documentation for the
project is not at the level it should be, even though we have made our
best effort to do so. At this point, we are hoping to get help from the
community. The level of help that we would like to get is varied. At
the top of the list would be creating issues
(https://github.com/containers/podman/issues) for any missing or
incorrect documentation. If someone in the community likes going
through man pages and making sure they're formatted consistently, we'd
love their help. If you ever wanted a big documentation project that
you could stamp your name on, then the Podman Users Guide might be a
great way to increase your documentation chops. Any help that you would
be willing to offer to better Podman's documentation would be gratefully
accepted.
Also, if you or someone you know is not terribly technical yet wants to
contribute to an Open Source project, this might be a great opportunity
to get your foot in the door. We'd be more than happy to walk someone
through the git submission processes in exchange for documentation
improvements for the project. Or if they're more comfortable sending in
something via email, we'd be happy to deal with the git side of things.
So if you have documentation improvement ideas or suggestions, please
add a comment to the discussion here
(https://github.com/containers/podman/discussions/10336), or send an
email to the Podman mailing list
(https://lists.podman.io/admin/lists/podman.lists.podman.io/).
Paraphrasing Richard Branson: No idea is too small, and all sorts of
ideas have the potential to change the project as we know it for the better.
We have an absolutely terrific and growing Podman community. Hopefully,
this effort will garner more contributors and create better
documentation for Podman. Thanks for your attention, and feel free to
contact me if you have any questions.
Best Wishes,
Tom Sweeney
tsweeney(a)redhat.com