[openj9-dev] OpenJ9 documentation and keeping it current

[Sue Chaplain <Sue_Chaplain@xxxxxxxxxx>]

IBM recently contributed some user documentation
to the Eclipse OpenJ9 project that covers tuning, configuration, and diagnostic
information. 

GitHub repository: https://github.com/eclipse/openj9-docs/
Online publication: https://www.eclipse.org/openj9/docs/
 

Most of this content is in the form
of a command reference, but work is underway to supplement this information
with more content about OpenJ9 components such as the JIT compiler, Garbage
Collection policies, shared classes cache implementation and how to interpret
different types of dumps produced by the VM.

Now that we have some documentation
in the project, it is very important that we keep it up to date with any
features or enhancements that are being made to the OpenJ9 code base. To
this end we have introduced a small process step in the OpenJ9 contribution
guides.

"If
your contribution introduces an external change that requires an update
to the user
documentation, make
sure you add the label "doc:externals" and open an issue at
the user doc GitHub repository. Examples of an external change include
a new command line option, a change in behavior, or a restriction".


To help developers provide enough information for other
contributors to write the content, we have introduced an issue template:

New documentation changes: https://github.com/eclipse/openj9-docs/issues/new?template=new-documentation-change.md

Contributions to the user docs are welcome,
so you can write your own update if you want to, but opening an issue ensures
that others can help and nothing gets missed when we pull together the
list of notable changes for a release. Source files are in markdown and
we use the MkDocs build toolchain to generate the online content. To find
out how to contribute to the user documentation, please read the contribution
guidelines (https://github.com/eclipse/openj9-docs/blob/master/CONTRIBUTING.md).



- Sue Chaplain

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