[Xapian-discuss] Writing a Quick Start Guide to Xapian

[Olly Betts]

I should have sent this a few weeks ago really, but better late than
never.  Hopefully people haven't got themselves booked up with other
things since.

I'll be in the UK after the mentor summit, and it seems that weekends
are probably going to fit best with most people, so given we need to
make a decision, let's do this over two weekends (which also gives
people time to mull things over between) and let's go for the weekends
29th-30th October and 5th-6th November.

I've cc:-ed those who expressed an interest originally, and Richard
and James can probably make a sprint in the UK those dates, but others
are welcome to join in too.

Justin's office in London is available those weekends, though ideally
we want to be able to accommodate people nearby for the Friday and
Saturday nights or else we're going to lose a lot of time to travelling.
We have some money from GSoC mentoring payments we can use for this,
though given London prices I'm wondering if a better solution would be
to rent a holiday cottage somewhere not too far from London that has
internet.  If anyone happens to know somewhere suitable, let me know.
Anyway, venue undecided currently, but near or in London, and we have
one definite decent option.

So if you want to take part and can definitely make those dates, please
let me know (off list is probably best, and I can summarise).  If you
are interested but not definite, feel free to respond too, but please
make that clear.

Ideally we want the same people to be there for the whole of both
weekends so we don't have to bring people up to speed, and make best
use of the resources we have.  If you have other commitments that would
prevent you attending the whole of both weekends, please warn us.

Feel free to ask questions, etc if you want to know more, but note you
don't need a huge amount of knowledge about Xapian to be useful - we're
aiming to write a guide useful for those new to Xapian, so it would be
good to have involvement from some people who are fairly new to it.

If you want to know more about what we'll be doing, see:

http://www.flossmanuals.net/book-sprints/

I think we're probably going to just write in reStructured Text (.rst)
rather than using the HTML-based flossmanuals tools, since we're
standardising on this for the existing documentation, and it's nicely
unobtrusive for writing in:

http://docutils.sourceforge.net/rst.html

Cheers,
    Olly