[Asterisk-doc] Welcome

[jsmith@drgutah.com]

Now that we (hopefully!) have more people subscribed to the list, I might
as well send out another welcome letter.

*Please* contribute what you can to the documentation project.  I
certainly can't do it all myself, and y'all are sure to know a lot more
than I do anyway.  I know our infrastructure is still a little
underdeveloped, but hopefully with your help we can bring things up to
speed quickly.

I've started writing the book in DocBook format, so that it's easy to
convert to a variety of other formats, and can be checked in/out of CVS
easily to track changes.  You can check the latest version out of CVS from
sourceforge.net.  The project is called "asterisk" and the CVS module is
called "docs".  (If you'd like specific information on how to check things
out of CVS, please ask.)  The book itself is called hgta.xml, and I've
also included a sample DocBook xml file called test-docbook.xml so that
you can get an idea of how things are done in DocBook.  If you're using
Linux and have the docbook utilities installed, you can use "db2pdf" and
"db2html" to convert the files to PDF and HTML format, respectively.

If you're inclined to hang out on IRC, you can usually find a few of us
hanging out in #asterisk-doc on the freenode.net servers.  (I'm on
vacation through next Thursday, so only have access to email until then.)

If you've got additions and/or changes you'd like to contribute, please
feel free to send them to either myself or Leif Madson (blitzrage on IRC)
and we'll try to get them integrated in as soon as possible.

Now, since it is the Thanksgiving holiday, I'd be ungrateful if I didn't
send out a giant "Thank You" to everyone who has contributed so far.  To
Leif Madson for getting me to start the book, to Steve Sokol for providing
the outline, to Jeremy McNamara for giving us CVS access to the asterisk
project on SourceForge, and to all the others who have contributed (or
offered to contribute) to the book.  Thanks!

Jared Smith