nginx documentation

[Igor Sysoev]

On Sun, Mar 04, 2007 at 05:53:39PM -0600, Gregg Reynolds wrote:

> I just discovered nginx last week and I've already jettisoned lighttpd
> in favor of nginx.  Very nice piece of work!
> 
> I've begun writing a detailed and thorough set of man pages for nginx.
> Well, a pair of them, anyway, nginx(8) and nginx.conf(5).  I've taken
> a different approach from the English wiki, though, in the way the
> material is organized.  To take one simple example, the stuff on the
> wiki is organized by module.  Nothing terribly wrong with that, but
> it's developer-oriented.  Ordinary _users_ of the software don't care
> about modules; for them it's better to organized things by functional
> category (or more generally, according to the mental model the user is
> likely to have of how a web server functions).  So I'm starting out
> with Principles of Operation (in loving memory of IBM's old POPs
> manuals for System/370), to go in nginx(8), with a companion reference
> manual on the syntax and vocab of the configuration manual.
> 
> One result of this approach is that directives are organized into
> functional areas, e.g. Process Configuration, Networking Config, Msg
> Handling, Dissemination to Responders, etc.  One interesting thing is
> that modeling the processing in terms of Responders to whom messages
> are distributed leads to the notion that the default static file
> server can be construed as just another Responder, the FSR (FileSystem
> Responder).  So the idea is that a simple static page server always
> implicitly routes messages to an implicit "fsr":  fsr_pass, just like
> it routes some messages to a fastcgi Responder (fastcgi_pass) and
> others to a proxy Responder (proxy_pass).  By the same token, blocked
> urls, exceptions, redirects can be construed in terms of an implicit
> "Exceptions Responder".
> 
> I've got a ways to go before the stuff is "publication ready", but I
> think I've got enought to solicit feedback and collaboration.  What's
> the best way to proceed?  I could post to the wiki, post to my own
> website, or email to anybody interested.
> 
> Nginx deserves excellent documentation.

Thank you.

I think the keeping the draft at website is enough.
However, I think that HTML pages is more handy than man format
(at least for web admins). Anyway, feel free to choose it.


-- 
Igor Sysoev
http://sysoev.ru/en/