Tutorial Renewal

DaCHS' documentation (readthedocs mirror) has two fat pieces and a lot of smaller read-as-you-go pieces. One of the behmoths, the reference documentation, at roughly 350 PDF pages, has large parts generated from source code, and there is no expectation that anyone would ever read it linearly. Hence, I wasn't terribly worried about unreadable^Wpassages of questionable entertainment value in there.

That's a bit different with the tutorial (also available as 150 page PDF; epub on request): I think serious DaCHS deployers ought to read the DaCHS Basics and the chapters on configuring DaCHS and the interaction with the VO Registry, and they should skim the remaining material so they are at least aware of what's there.

Ok. I give you that is a bit utopian. But given that pious wish I felt rather bad that the tutorial has become somewhat incoherent in the years since I had started the piece in April 2009 (perhaps graciously, the early history is not visible at the documentation's current github home). Hence, when applying for funds under our current e-inf-astro project, I had promised to give the tutorial a solid makeover as, hold your breath, Milestone B1-5, due in the 10th quarter. In human terms: last December.

When it turned out the Python 3 migration was every bit as bad as I had feared, it became clear that other matters had to take priority and that we might miss this part of that “milestone” (sorry, I can't resist these quotes). And given e-inf-astro only had two quarters to go after that, I prepared for having to confess I couldn't make good on my promise of fixing the tutorial.

But then along came Corona, and reworking prose seemed the ideal pastime for the home office. So, on April 4, I forked off a new-tutorial branch and started a rather large overhaul that, among others, resulted in the operators' guide with its precarious position between tutorial and reference being largely absorbed into the tutorial. In all, off and on over the last few months I accumulated (according to git diff --shortstat 6372 inserted and 3453 deleted lines in the tutorial's source. Since that source currently is 7762 lines, I'd say that's the complete makeover I had promised. Which is good as e-inf-astro will be over next Wednesday (but don't worry, our work is still funded).

So – whether you are a DaCHS expert, think about running it, or if you're just curious what it takes to build VO services, let me copy from index.html: Tutorial on importing data (tutorial.html,tutorial.pdf,tutorial.rstx). The ideal company for your vacation!

And if you find typos, boring pieces, overly radical advocacy or anything else you don't like: there's a bug tracker for you (not to mention PRs are welcome).