Update README files and convert to Markdown

Co-authored-by: Andrew Hanushevsky <[email protected]>

MANIFEST.in

@@ -1,7 +1,7 @@
 include *.sh *.py *.in
 include CMakeLists.txt
 include COPYING* LICENSE
-include VERSION README
+include VERSION README.md
 
 recursive-include bindings *
 recursive-include cmake *

README.md

@@ -0,0 +1,99 @@
+<p align="center">
+  <img src="https://xrootd.slac.stanford.edu/images/xrootd-logo.png"/>
+</p>
+
+## XRootD: eXtended ROOT Daemon
+
+The [XRootD](http://xrootd.org) project provides a high-performance,
+fault-tolerant, and secure solution for handling massive amounts of data
+distributed across multiple storage resources, such as disk servers, tape
+libraries, and remote sites. It enables efficient data access and movement in a
+transparent and uniform manner, regardless of the underlying storage technology
+or location. It was initially developed by the High Energy Physics (HEP)
+community to meet the data storage and access requirements of the BaBar
+experiment at SLAC and later extended to meet the needs of experiments at the
+Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN. XRootD is the core technology powering the
+[EOS](https://eos-web.web.cern.ch/) distributed filesystem, which is the storage
+solution used by LHC experiments and the storage backend for
+[CERNBox](https://cernbox.web.cern.ch/). XRootD is also used as the core
+technology for global CDN deployments across multiple science domains.
+
+XRootD is based on a scalable architecture that supports multi-protocol
+communications. XRootD provides a set of plugins and tools that allows the user
+to configure it freely to deploy data access clusters of any size, and which can
+include sophisticated features such as erasure coded files, various methods of
+authentication and authorization, as well as integration with other storage
+systems like [ceph](https://ceph.io).
+
+## Documentation
+
+Genral documentation such as configuration reference guides, and user manuals
+can be found on the XRootD website at http://xrootd.org/docs.html.
+
+## Supported Operating Systems
+
+XRootD is officially supported on the following platforms:
+
+ * RedHat Enterprise Linux 7 or later and their derivatives
+ * Debian 11 and Ubuntu 22.04 or later
+ * macOS 11 (Big Sur) or later
+
+Support for other operating systems is provided by the community.
+
+## Installation Instructions
+
+XRootD is available via official channels in most operating systems.
+Installation via the system package manager should be preferred if possible.
+
+In RPM-based distributions, like CentOS, Alma, Rocky, Fedora, etc, one can
+search and install XRootD packages with
+
+```sh
+$ yum search xrootd
+$ sudo yum install xrootd* python3-xrootd
+```
+or
+```sh
+$ dnf search xrootd
+$ sudo dnf install xrootd* python3-xrootd
+```
+
+In some distributions, it may be necessary to first install the EPEL release
+repository with `yum install epel-release` or `dnf install epel-release`.
+
+On Debian 11 or later, and Ubuntu 22.04 or later, XRootD can be installed via apt
+
+```sh
+$ apt search xrootd
+$ sudo apt install xrootd* python3-xrootd
+```
+
+On macOS, XRootD is available via Homebrew
+```sh
+$ brew install xrootd
+```
+
+Finally, it is also possible to install the XRootD python bindings from PyPI
+using pip:
+```
+$ pip install xrootd
+```
+
+For detailed instructions on how to build and install XRootD from source code,
+please see [docs/INSTALL.md](docs/INSTALL.md) in this repository.
+
+## User Support and Bug Reports
+
+Bugs should be reported using [GitHub issues](https://github.com/xrootd/xrootd/issues).
+You can open a new ticket by clicking [here](https://github.com/xrootd/xrootd/issues/new).
+
+For general questions about XRootD, you can send a message to our user mailing
+list at [email protected]. Please check XRootD's contact page at
+http://xrootd.org/contact.html for further information.
+
+## Contributing
+
+User contributions can be submitted via pull request on GitHub. We recommend
+that you create your own fork of XRootD on GitHub and use it to submit your
+patches. For more detailed instructions on how to contribute, please refer to
+the file [docs/CONTRIBUTING.md](docs/CONTRIBUTING.md).