The future of Fedora Docs website

Fewer obsolete search results :tada:

Firstly, thanks to whomever changed the docs.fedoraproject.org’s robots.txt file; I see far fewer links to doc pages for obsolete unsupported Fedora releases (weirdly, still some in DuckDuckGo results, e.g. Adding an IPP Printer from F14 in this).

I’m not sure about “The docs have good SEO”. Now the obsolete pages are gone I rarely see docs.fedoraproject pages in search results, period.

Kill obsolete docs, make money

The psychic unburdening of killing old docs altogether will help people working on documentation. I’m glad to see you’re planning to do this in “the removal of old docs”, and my offer to pay anyone who nukes them from orbit $100 still stands :moneybag:.

Continuous improvement beats planning the future

I’m also the person who found and reported many issues with the installation guide when I installed Fedora 36, starting with the meta-issue that it begs people to give feedback and open issues in the wrong place. I’m dismayed that 3 months on these relatively easy-to-fix issues are still present and y’all are discussing replacing or removing the installation guide.

We have the alternative more or less ready. Or better alternative 2, because we have no documentation for Workstation at all nor for Cloud

I don’t see any installation guide in either.

a planned Anaconda installer update may be the right time to revamp the content for Workstation Edition

(gently…) From the outside this looks like analysis paralysis, second-system syndrome, and the best being the enemy of the good all at once.

A documentation fix now is more valuable than a plan to revamp or replace some time in the future, especially now that Fedora has an easy gitlab-based way to propose incremental improvements. I meant to someday follow up my gitlab issue reports on the Installation Guide by clicking the call to action to “Edit this page”, but seeing them all closed and reading talk of future plans instead dissuades me from bothering :slightly_frowning_face:.

If this comes across as sour unappreciative ranting I apologize, that’s not my intention. I know documentation is tricky :hugs:. Cheers, good luck.

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There are several installation guides, specific for Fedora Server, Fedora CoreOS etc. I guess you are talking about an installation guide for one of the desktop variants. And yes, we would like to have an Installation Guide for it as well. There is also a place for it in the design, see the Workstation Box.

The background is that the installation guide is from a time when there was only one Fedora CD with which different variants could be installed. The variants have evolved so that there is now a separate installation media for each variant. And the concept of one installation guide for all these variants does not work anymore.

If you could help us create a desktop installation guide, that would be great.

@skierpage I understand your disappointment. However, your efforts are not wasted. We were made aware of the condition by the contributions of you and of others.

I also understand your argument that we should not make too long plans but do something now. But given the many issues in the Install Guide, a few small fixes cannot change that it is at the moment everything but eligible for its purpose (I assume you saw #11, which is only what I recognized while skimming). You are right that we need some immediate action here. But instead of start to fix this one by one, which would again take a long time where these pages are online in a bad condition, the alternative is: simply put these pages offline until we have something that is eligible.

We have to focus to tackle origins and not symptoms on the long term.