Tool The Docs
20 years with DocBook
Experiences from the PostgreSQL project
PostgreSQL has been maintaining its documentation in DocBook for over twenty years. It's been successful but not without challenges. PostgreSQL is
often praised for its excellent documentation, and PostgreSQL is also often criticized for its hard-to-approach documentation.
Maintaining documentation for a project such as PostgreSQL comes with a number of challenges. There are many challenges writing good documentation, but in this talk we'll focus on the tooling. First, the documentation is quite big: In a printable format it is over 2000 pages. This pushes many build tools beyond their limits. And of course we also want documentation builds to finish in a reasonable time. Second, we need tooling longevity and portability. Database server software is long-running software. We still need to be able to patch and rebuild everything many years from now. In the world of writing and publishing tools, there is often a new idea every few years with many dependencies and no long-term track record, which makes it difficult for us to adopt things like that. It took us many years to get just a few graphics into the documentation because the tooling issues were too overwhelming.
DocBook has been good to us, but there have been plenty of struggles along the way, and there are some concerns about the future.
Additional information
| Type | devroom |
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More sessions
| 2/7/21 |
We can't have our normal brunch this year, so let's all meet before the talks start and enjoy… Well, whatever we want too :)
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| 2/7/21 |
Learn about the missing ingredient from your Docs-as-Code recipe, a headless CMS (Content Management System). Let's understand the problems writers face and how adding a CMS to your Docs toolchain helps solve (some of) them. We'll look at a sample docs-as-code repository and then add a CMS to the mix. We'll then go through authoring new topics and editing existing docs with our CMS (Look ma, no Git).
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| 2/7/21 |
Originally having been developed for the open source projects at Facebook, Docusaurus now serves as an easy-to-use tool across many open-source projects. Having worked with it on the Google Season of Docs for transforming Rucio's documentation (http://rucio.cern.ch/documentation/) & as the SIG DOCS lead for LitmusChaos, this talk is an exposition of my experiences with the static site generator. I hope to benefit others looking at migrating to/using this tool with the contents.
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| 2/7/21 |
The combination of AsciiDoc and Gradle should be well known by now. But what if you want to go beyond? Have you ever tried to include UML diagrams the easy way, convert Excel to AsciiDoc or export your results to Confluence? This talk shows you what you can really do if you treat your docs as code and apply some tricks you only did to your code before. Forget about copy & paste your images to your documentation – let the build do it! Create different docs for different stakeholders and ...
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| 2/7/21 |
The tool Antora creates documentation websites from AsciiDoc sources stored in Git repositories. Users can browse the generated website and select the version matching the software they use. Navigation outlines, search and cross-references between pages allow users to find answers to their questions. Several open-source software projects like Camel, Debezium and Couchbase use this solution.
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| 2/7/21 |
In 2017 Nexmo (now Vonage) launched their first documentation portal as a Ruby on Rails site. Fast forward more than 3 years and the Vonage API Developer is now running on a custom-built open-source tool we call Station. Station powers multiple documentation portals, and allows us to achieve numerous organizational goals. How did we arrive at Station and not get derailed in the process? In this talk, we will take a deep dive into the technical journey behind Station. What does the tech stack ...
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| 2/7/21 |
Thomas Cort link checking suite is Node.js software to make the checking of links in documentation sites (and not only doc) easy and efficient. It can be used as a standalone or in a CI process. It's configurable and of course as an open source project, you can customise and participate by pushing Pull Requests. As one of the maintainers of this tool suite, I will provide an overview of the link checking process as well as a tour of the reasons why you should care about your links and a demo of ...
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