<sect1 id="manuals-production-identifying-goals">

    <title>Identifying Document Goals</title>

    <para>
        The first step in producing a documentation manual is to
        clearly understand what you exactly need to document and why
        you need to do so. The obvious answer to this question would
        be to describe the basic ideas behind an implementation so it
        can be useful once published. It is important that you find
        out the reasons you need to do what you are doing and, also,
        those helping you to retain the motivation to keep doing it in
        the future. Otherwise, without such foundations, you'll surely
        end up leaving the effort soon enough to make a lost cause
        from your initial work.
    </para>

    <para>
        Before <citetitle>The CentOS Artwork Repository File
        System</citetitle> documentation manual would exist, there was
        an emerging need to understand what each directory inside the
        growing directory layout was for, how it could be used and
        each directory could be connected one another. At that moment,
        the directory layout was very unstable and explaining the
        whole idea behind it was not possible, there were too many
        changing concepts floating around which needed to be
        considered in the same changing way.  So, to understand what
        was happening, the <citetitle>The CentOS Artwork Repository
        File System</citetitle> documentation manual was created.
    </para>
    
    <para>
        The <citetitle>The CentOS Artwork Repository File
        System</citetitle> manual was conceived based on the idea of
        documenting each directory inside the repository individually
        and, later, by considering all directory documentations
        altogether, it would be (hypothetically) possible to correct
        the whole idea through an improvement cycle that would
        consolidate the final idea we were trying to implement.
    </para>
    
    <para>
        Other documentation manuals can be based on reasons different
        from those described above, however, no matter what those
        reasons are, it will be helpful to make yourself a clean idea
        about what you are going to document exactly before putting
        your hands on it.
    </para>

</sect1>