Category: Pedias

Discussions are understanding-oriented articles aimed at explaining a particular topic. They are encyclopedic, intended to provide an overview of the subject at hand and various perspectives of it. A discussion article might be read casually for leisure, rather than being used as reference while coding.

Style

Besides the general style considerations, discussion articles should be written with the following considerations in mind:

• Accessibility: discussions are often the first thing a new user will read about any subject, so they should be accessible to beginners.
• Overview: discussions must provide a clear overview of their subject matter, and be accordingly organized into easily navigable sections.
• Variety: related to the previous point, where appropriate discussions should cover multiple workflows, approaches and perspectives to the topic.

Canonical Form

While in general, discussion articles can take a wide variety of forms, certain types of articles recur in the NixOS wiki and warrant specific formats. For these we provide a canonical form, designed for articles covering a software package, application or library. The following structure is recommended for such articles, with the first sections considered most critical:

1. Introduction: a general overview.
2. Usage: a practical overview of different approaches to installing, configuring and operating the software, linking to more comprehensive guides.
3. Internals: a theoretical overview of the internal architecture of the software, including critical files and directories, processes and objects.
4. Development: a project overview for potential contributors, including an overview of the source-code directory structure, development process, issue tracking and the developer community.
5. History: a historical overview of the software, including an overview of the origins and past development of the software, and the broader historical context, such as precedents and antecedents.