Inside TLDP

TLDP is short for The Linux
Documentation Project, an organization of volunteers authoring, reviewing and managing
documents about the Linux operating system. Documents basically come in
two formats based upon their length. The shorter ones generally are
called HOWTOs (or mini-HOWTOs, if they are really short), the longer
documents, called guides, deal in-depth with a Linux feature.

The number of topics discussed in these HOWTOs and guides is practically unlimited,
ranging from installing the Linux system to managing all
kinds of devices, services and environments, to creating your own system
from scratch. Name any topic, there's something about it in TLDP, mainly
thanks to volunteers who share their experiences.

All the documentation is freely available in several formats
suitable for printing and on-line browsing. The main submission language
is English, but several translation efforts, including French, German and Chinese,
try to make this immense amount of information available to a wider public.
How to Use TLDP
Linux environments tend to change at a rather high speed, so do the
docs. Sooner rather than later, submissions about new protocols and
applications reach TLDP, outdating older documents. The main problem
here is TLDP maintainers usually are rather soft-hearted, so
partly out of melancholy, partly out of respect and sometimes partly
because of the lack of volunteers for upgrading a document, they tend to
archive everything.

Given this information, it might thus be best to stick to the following
golden rules when searching the LDP collection:

• 1. Check the revision date on a document. If it's older than a year,
  don't depend on it too much.
• 2. Check that a document is being updated
  regularly; this is an extra
  sign that it is being maintained seriously.

Most documents contain revision history information in the preface.
How Did TLDP Get Started?
As Matt Welsh, one of the co-founders, puts it: "The history of the LDP
is a pretty murky memory these days." It started in 1992, before the
World Wide Web existed. It's hard to imagine how we did without HTML, but in
those days almost everything was FTP and Usenet and dial-in to a BBS was
most likely. In the beginning, most of the documentation was in one big
file, split into sections, called the Linux FAQ.

Later, Matt got together with Lars Wirzenius and Michael K. Johnson,
who had the idea of producing printed Linux documentation.
Michael initially started on a kernel hackers guide, Lars did the system
administrator guide and Matt wrote the first installation guide.
Everything was done in LaTeX, so the only way to read these docs in a
reasonably comfortable way was either by printing them out or using a
PostScript viewer.

But as Linux capabilities grew, it was no longer possible for one person
to maintain everything. Pretty soon, not even several people could manage
the job. Thus, the HOWTOs were born, each describing a part of the
original big chunk of information. This created an easily extendible system that
allows for many authors to contribute to their areas of
specialization.

That effort lead to the use of SGML, which enabled the fast generation of all
sorts of output formats, including HTML, from one source file or set of
files. The first tests were conducted at Sunsite (a famous server
machine at the University of North Carolina), which was the first Web
site offering information about Linux. Also, when you wanted to download
Linux software, Sunsite.unc.edu was the place to go. It still contains
some kernel archives--probably by accident, there also are a lot of
empty directories these days.

Before the crash (May 2003) I was able to find, via FTP, a document
referring to two maintainers of the LDP as it was run by the end of 1994
at UNC. It pointed to Jon Magid and a mysterious Erik with no last name,
who was still at Sunsite in 1996.

After extended research in the dungeon server rooms of Google, we can
state with almost certainty that the mysterious Erik does have a last
name after all. Most likely, we are dealing here with the Erik Troan,
who supported possibly half of the Linux users in the 1993-1996 period
and later on became the Senior Director of Engineering at Red Hat.

Further research revealed that sometime in 1996, Greg Hankins became
supervisor of the LDP project. He was the original author of the
Serial
HOWTO, which he began maintaining in 1993; he also was one
of the main contributors to the SGML-tools development project.
Growing
LDP is becoming more popular by the day, and the entire
collection was published on paper several times. LSL (now CheapBytes)
was the publisher of multiple editions. They were called "The Linux Bible",
"Dr. Linux", "Linux Getting Started", "Linux the Complete Reference" and
"The Linux Encyclopedia".

By 1997, Guylhem Aznar was appointed coordinator of the LDP. His job was
to unify the LDP again: mailing lists and servers were in operation all over the
world, and nobody knew who was responsible for what. He started by
putting together a staff, a team of volunteers that could give structure
to TLDP.

The exact configuration of the
core
team in those days has been preserved. It was composed of a hub, consisting
of one main coordinator, plus individual FAQ, Guide and HOWTO
coordinators, Greg Ferguson, Joshua Drake and Tim Bynum, respectively.
Furthermore, most translation efforts started in 1994 now are running
more or less at full speed, and people have been appointed to
manage each translation. One project not listed here, although it was
among the first, is the German translation effort. As with the recent
joining of some Italian translators, it sometimes takes a while for
people find one another.

This team registered the linuxdoc.org domain and moved the entire Linux
documentation collection to it, which promptly was mirrored.
The relationship with iBiblio (formerly sunsite.UNC.edu) was maintained
during the romance with SGI, and the university became a mirror site.
The love didn't last, however, and TLDP moved to iBiblio again after
the short SGI intermezzo. Paul Jones and
his colleagues, responsible for managing TLDP at iBilbio, were very
understanding and provided a lot of support, which enabled the
centralization of resources in North Carolina.

As far as we could find out, Guylhem and his team also started the
discussion and other mailing lists. Prior to that, discussion primarily
happened in the Usenet newsgroups. The mailing lists were a good
thing; I remember that newsfeed in those days was generating enormous
amounts of traffic and consumed--for that time--unreasonable amounts of
bandwidth. Some ISPs decided to offer only a partial feed or none at all.

1998 saw the publication of "Linux Undercover", subtitled "Linux Secrets
as Revealed by the Linux Documentation Project". Red Hat was the first to
use the new just-in-time production method. Previous printed versions
often contained stale HOWTOs, but this one essentially was printed
straight from the on-line master documents.
Some Serious Organizing
In 1999, the project hosted eight guides, including version 1.0 of the
Linux Network Administrator's Guide and beta-1 of the Linux User's
Guide. These and other documents still were written mostly in SGML or LaTeX.

The first occurrences of DocBook were seen in 2000; DocBook now is
the preferred submission format because it enables easy
generation of HTML, PS, PDF and other formats from the source files.

Another novelty that came with the 21st century was the creation of a
versioning system. Sergiusz Pawlowicz and Gregory Leblanc were
responsible for the setup; Sergiusz still manages our CVS. He also
became the listmaster by the end of 2000. Up until then, Debian hosted
the TLDP mailing lists.

TLDP project was maturing and growing in every possible way. To this
end, David S. Lawyer finalized the
LDP Manifesto.
David is still the point of contact for all license issues.

A new Web site layout was probably the most visible improvement. The new
millennium brought the precursor of the site as it is today.
From LinuxDoc.org to TLDP.org
In some documents you still can see references to the old linuxdoc.org
domain. The reason for the domain switch was not pretty, unfortunately,
but as it is part of the TLDP story, it should be told.

As is so often the case, goodwill and kindness made selfishness rise to
the occasion. Many people are interested in TLDP, but not always for the
good of the project.

At the time Guylhem was elected president, there was only one other
candidate. Guylhem didn't want that man to feel left out, so he trusted
him to be the webmaster. TLDP lost the linuxdoc.org domain because the
webmaster managed to claim ownership of it. He also purchased the .com
domain and ran a commercial Web site on it on the back of TLDP. Needless
to say, this caused a lot of friction.

So a new domain had to be found, and tldp.org was
short and free. Guylhem took his responsibilities seriously, registered
the domain in 2002 and moved the project to the current domain. The team
also took this opportunity to broaden the scope of the project, and they
combined the move with a restructuring operation that made the project
much more efficient.
New Procedures
But all these efforts were not enough. Ever more authors and other
volunteers needed guidance, and ever more documents had to be organized. The
project hosted a lot of outdated documents by now, which became a bit
shameful. Another problem was the random publication of documents. There
was so much work and not enough people to do it, so anybody could publish
almost anything. Scandal broke loose when a couple of opinionated
documents were found, containing tainted and sometimes plainly wrong
information that was possibly harmful to the readers.

Thus, 2003 became the year of revamping. A thorough search through the
entire collection revealed more old or doubtful documents that were
taken off-line for a revision. Documents too old to be useful were
moved to the attic. Tabatha Marshall was appointed
review coordinator and put together a team of reviewers. Together, they
edit new submissions: they check for technical correctness, readability
and grammar and spelling errors. Furthermore, they apply the TLDP style
so as to give the collection consistency. The Weekly News was revived
and offered over RSS feed. Input from the feedback mailing list was
followed up once more. The
Author
Guide was revised to
list the new procedures for publishing documents in accordance with the
quality control guidelines. A HOWTO generator was created to facilitate
submissions by new authors. Beyond these visible accomplishments,
hundreds of people are working together now, everyone of them
contributing a small part to this huge project.

People responsible for managing projects often ask us how we do it. This
is how. There is no book that tells you how to do it. We are on a road
with many bumps and ups and downs, and TLDP seemingly hangs together with
hooks and eyes--but it's there and it doesn't go away.