Hi List,

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.

-gregg