Subject: The state of Linux-Vserver documentation (was: Linux Vserver and Hypervisors)
From: Ben Green <ben@bristolwireless.net>
Date: Sat, 09 Nov 2013 11:25:27 +0000

Quoting Allan Latham <alatham@flexsys-group.de>:

> Hi all
>
> I think this is an important subject but is only a subset of a major
> disadvantage of vserver.

Some of your points are perhaps valid, but you are basically starting  
an entirely different thread here, I've changed the subject to reflect  
that.

You are saying that Linux-Vserver is great technically but has poor  
documentation. The documentation IMHO is not the best within the free  
software world, but its not the worst by a long shot. I've always  
found Herbert and Daniel most helpful on the IRC channel, 50% of the  
time they've pointed me to a page of documentation which I'd missed.  
Yes this is a project which requires an amount of technical knowledge  
to get started on. It didn't take me long to get started personally.

So, the question which this brings up for me are:

Who would like to see the documentation enhanced?
Who would be willing to enhance the documentation?

I my own line of work when we adopted Vserver on my recommendation. My  
arguments at the time where as follows:

* other virtualisation environments are pointlessly inefficient and we  
don't have the hardware to run what we are now running with them
* its simple, very transparent and easy to install guests
* guest cloning and moving is simple and efficient
* guests security is excellent
* the kernel and user space components have Debian support (this has  
since been dropped of course)

I would now replace the last point with:

* repositories are available for Debian

I think the project would benefit from better documentation, which  
project wouldn't? I personally don't have time to give it a big  
overhaul, but occasionally update pages on the wiki.

Cheers,
Ben