Identifying Document Goals
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.
Before The CentOS Artwork Repository File
System 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 The CentOS Artwork Repository
File System documentation manual was created.
The The CentOS Artwork Repository File
System 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.
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.