A Newbie In X; Creating X.Org Documentation

Matt Dew, a self-proclaimed "X newbie", just finished talking about his experiences as just entering the world of X.Org development and hopes to contribute to the X.Org world by gathering up and improving X.Org documentation.

As most know who have ever investigated X.Org, traditionally the documentation covering the software stack has been rather fragmented or even nonexistent in many places. This lack of reliable X.Org documentation can lead to a steep learning curve for new developers and can be a deterrent when coupled with the fact X.Org is complicated, but Matt hopes to work towards addressing this longstanding problem by rounding up the existing documentation from various sources and then eventually to write documentation for the missing pieces (particularly the newer areas, but also for areas like libdrm).

As part of this clean-up process, Matt hopes to move all X.Org documentation into one format (right now there's around five different document formats used by X components), clean-up this documentation, and then create a table of contents / index, creating a CSS style, cross-linking, and other items. The initial documentation conversion should be complete by the end of September while more of the work he hopes to have completed by January.

By summer of 2012, Matt Dew hopes to have X.Org documented to a state that it's considered "good", or even possibly "great."

The audio recordings are still going on, although the quality of some of the talks may vary as the audio line feed from the theater's audio system seems to have died.