<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 exist, there was an
        emerging need to understand what each directory inside the
        growing directory layout was for, how they could be used and
        how they 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
        individually documenting each directory inside the repository
        and, later, by considering all directory documentations
        together, it would be (hypothetically) possible to correct the
        whole idea through an improvement cycle that would consolidate
        the final idea we try to implement.
    </para>
    
    <para>
        Other documentation manuals can be based on reasons different
        from those described above, however, no matter what those
        reasons be, 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>