The subject (I believe) says it all. There are bits and pieces of documentation, mostly assuming that the user is a competent system developer.
Is there a single, comprehensive User Guide with no prerequisite other than fundamental understanding of how the hybrid cryptography works? Something I could point my non‑technical correspondents to?
I apologize in advance if I missed it and would be much obliged if someone can point me to such document so I can pass it on to those I hope to get to use this system.
Our documentation is in a bit of a work-in-progress state at the moment, as we (mostly myself, but I’d appreciate any extra help I can get ) work on moving it from its current adhoc and somewhat disorganized form on our gitlab wiki to its new home, https://docs.jami.net (more on this in a future announcement).
Please have a look at (and feel free to share) the pages I’ve moved over so far – e.g. the brief introduction, or the frequently asked questions – and for the remainder of the pages that have not yet been moved over, refer to our gitlab wiki’s list of all pages for now.
thanks for the answer. It helps, but I would respectfully suggest that there is a huge imbalance between the features this application provides and the documentation required for a user that is not an IT professional/programmer/developer to use it.
A bunch of git pages in perpetual flux and an amorphous FAQ is something that might come naturally to a software developer, but a non-technical user needs a well written file/document (preferably .pdf) consisting of two parts: “Concepts and Facilities” and “User’s Reference Manual”. As an example, may I suggest looking at the old (now discontinued) TC application; the manual of which can still be found on the 'net, as, for instance,here:
If Jami developers ever decide to take the user documentation in that direction, I would be interested in helping.
(why? Jami is the only asymmetric crypto communication app that I know of, that “gets it right”, i.e., “…account is identified by a Jami ID, which is a fingerprint of (the) public key…”
Thanks for the feedback. I, too, would very much like to see more in-depth and user-oriented documentation for Jami.
A work-in-progress technical overview was written/gathered here (thanks to @wrycode) which I’m working on improving and bringing over to https://docs.jami.net, but it will take me a bit more time.
I’d very much welcome and appreciate any help and feedback with the docs :
if you have some ideas/changes in mind that you’d like to contribute directly, please see the How to contribute to this documentation page for instructions on how to retrieve the jami-docs git repository, build it locally on your machine, and send patches for it to the jami-docs project on the Jami Gerrit for review and merge; or
otherwise if you’d like to share/discuss specific suggestions, ideas, and/or requests for documentation about some part of Jami, please open them as issues on the bug tracker for jami-docs on the Jami GitLab so we could keep track of them.
The new work-in-progress documentation site (https://docs.jami.net) uses the widely-used Sphinx documentation framework for converting documentation from a variety of input formats like reStructuredText and Markdown to a variety of output formats including HTML and PDF (via LaTeX). Currently we only build and host an HTML version of the docs, but we should be able to build and distribute a PDF version additionally with relative ease later on as well.
Bandali, I would be willing to help some. But you must understand that documentation requires direct contact with the programmers so that interpretation can take place. For instance, if one wishes to address how to install, then the one who knows the intent of the creators must explain the steps and why.
As the documentation is filled out, question come up that must be answered, not by guesswork, but by facts. The documenter can only assume so much.
