The documentation for release 1.2 is up at http://dev.cleversafe.org/doc.
These docs are done using AsciiDoc.
Monthly Archive for March, 2009
We’ve been struggling lately to determine which tool we’ll be using for technical documentation. We’ve bounced back and forth between latex and docbook. A few weeks ago I had decided that latex was the way to go, and was just looking for a good build system for it. The problem is that most latex systems use custom Make scripts to do the builds, and package management is a pain.
To simplify matters I was just using Python’s documentation system. They had been using latex for a while and had a pretty good build script. Then, all of the sudden they switched to using Sphinx, a build system that uses restructured text. While switching to latex we had been having developers do initial documentation in asciidoc, a similiar plain text markup system. The advantage to that system is that it is similiar to MediaWiki markup, which developers are familiar with because we use MediaWiki for an internal wiki. So I was thrilled to see a system that had good pdf and html output and used a plain text markup system. The advantage to such systems is that they typically have a lower learning curve than tools like docbook and latex.
We have made the source code for the Dispersed Storage Network 1.2 available on our Mercurial repository at hg.cleversafe.org. I’ve tagged this as alpha for now, as I haven’t had the opportunity to do a full set of tests on it. I’ll post binaries once this is done. However, if you are interested in trying it out you can check it out yourself.
I will be posting some preliminary usage documentation in the next few days.
I regret that the current release does not yet include rebuild functionality. We are still working out patent issues with this. However, the new release does include a lot of usability enhancements, a “registry” for centralized configuration, and alpha file system vault with WebDAV support.