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Posted to dev@subversion.apache.org by Karl Fogel <kf...@newton.ch.collab.net> on 2002/10/24 23:17:49 UTC
Exciting news about the Subversion Handbook...
Some nice news, everyone: O'Reilly & Associates will be publishing
"Subversion: The Definitive Guide", based on the Handbook sitting in
our tree. Before going into the details, I'll answer the most
important question first:
Yes, the book will continue to be Free. You can buy it from O'Reilly
if you want, but you can also print it out yourself, browse it as
HTML, or read the raw XML if you like that sort of thing :-). It is
under the same license as the rest of Subversion. You could even fork
it, though hopefully no one will ever want to.
Now, the details:
The authors are Ben Collins-Sussman, Mike Pilato, and Brian
Fitzpatrick. They've signed a contract with O'Reilly to turn it into
a much more complete work, with a real editing process, a professional
indexer, etc. They're responsible for providing O'Reilly with the
material by a certain date, thus their names are on the cover. (And,
I should point out, they've already started and have been working late
nights for quite a while now.)
After they and O'Reilly decided to do this, an obvious question arose:
should they just fork the Handbook and work out of their own
repository? That seemed like a bad option. What would become of the
old Handbook then? It would be hard for anyone to get up the
motivation to maintain the Handbook, knowing it would soon be
obsolete. And furthermore, it would be counterintuitive, and
inconvenient, to have the main Subversion documentation located
outside the Subversion source tree.
For these reasons, we decided it makes much more sense to have the new
book *replace* the Handbook, and work on it right here in the public
tree. Furthermore, that makes it easy for others to continue
contributing to it. The contribution and commit process is the same
as for the rest of Subversion, but please give Fitz, Mike, and Ben
some extra leeway in making decisions -- documentation is helped by a
consistent authorial voice, and if we give them the necessary room to
make judgement calls, they'll never be tempted to fork from the main
tree, got it? :-)
So over the next few days, they'll be importing the sources of the new
Guide, which contains all the material in the Handbook plus more.
Note that the Guide is written in DocBook XML, so those who want to
build the documentation themselves will have to install a few more
tools (I've already done it, it's not hard). The DocBook DTD is quite
easy to learn, and if you had any doubts whether it's worth switching,
they will be erased when you see the new PDF/PostScript output. It's
*beautiful*, a whole different universe from what we were getting from
Texinfo.
Of course, regular users will never need to build the documentation --
it will be included prebuilt in all distribution tarballs, and also be
available for download from the Subversion site.
That's it. Please post if any questions... And, congratulations to
Fitz & Mike & Ben! It's going to be a great book, based on what I've
seen so far.
-Karl
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Re: Exciting news about the Subversion Handbook...
Posted by "Edward S. Marshall" <es...@logic.net>.
On Thu, 2002-10-24 at 18:17, Karl Fogel wrote:
> The authors are Ben Collins-Sussman, Mike Pilato, and Brian
> Fitzpatrick.
Unimaginably cool. Congratulations, guys!
(Is there a requirement for all CollabNet employees to be published
within X months of date of hire? I can count quite a few by-lines over
there at this point. ;-) Of course, with Tim O'Reilly on the board...
*grin*)
--
Edward S. Marshall <es...@logic.net>
http://esm.logic.net/
Re: Exciting news about the Subversion Handbook...
Posted by Branko Čibej <br...@xbc.nu>.
Alan Langford wrote:
> Of course, squirrels often forget where they hid their nuts, so maybe
> that's not such a good idea.
Elephants, on the other hand, have long memories. :-)
Guys, guess what happened to me today? I was "selling" Subversion to one
of our customers today. When asked about documentation, I boasted about
us having a nice little handbook and started looking for it -- and
suddently I saw a bunch of DocBook stuff that hadn't been there a moment
ago. I think I hid my confusion pretty well when I extemporized that,
"of course, a book will be published with the 1.0 release."
This is soooo wonderful, beautiful and cool!
--
Brane Čibej <br...@xbc.nu> http://www.xbc.nu/brane/
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Re: Exciting news about the Subversion Handbook...
Posted by Alan Langford <ja...@ambitonline.com>.
At 2002/10/24 19:32 -0500, B. W. Fitzpatrick wrote:
>While O'Reilly is giving us immense leeway in the direction of the
>book, alas the choice of animal is not up to us. Here's a little
>information about how they come up with their animals:
>
> http://www.oreilly.com/news/lejeune_0400.html
When in doubt, lobby. From http://www.oreilly.com/news/ediemals_0400.html:
"We've learned all sorts of things about the animals from our readers and
authors. One author desperately wanted to have a boll weevil on his book
cover, so he sent me a pile of information about boll weevils, carefully
pointing out all of the reasons why the boll weevil was the perfect animal
for the topic. I ended up using it for his book, Oracle Web Applications."
Of course, squirrels often forget where they hid their nuts, so maybe
that's not such a good idea.
Re: Exciting news about the Subversion Handbook...
Posted by "Glenn A. Thompson" <gt...@cdr.net>.
Hey,
I guess the big question is....
What animal?
That must be fun to kick around. So many ways to go. A fish eating
shark or a kinder gentler tree dwelling squirrel who will never misplace
his nuts:-)
gat
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Doc patches (Was: Exciting news about the Subversion Handbook...)
Posted by "Andreas J. Koenig" <an...@anima.de>.
Congrats and thanks for the book project to all involved parties!
Please let me take this opportunity to remind you of the doc patches I
sent in recently (Oct 18). I just verified on
http://svnbook.red-bean.com/book.html
that the typos I fixed in these patches still need fixing.
Thanks,
--
andreas
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Re: Exciting news about the Subversion Handbook...
Posted by Nuutti Kotivuori <na...@iki.fi>.
Karl Fogel wrote:
> Note that the Guide is written in DocBook XML, so those who want to
> build the documentation themselves will have to install a few more
> tools (I've already done it, it's not hard).
Now that's.. that's.. I'm at a loss of words.
Guess I lost my last incentive to learn texinfo :-)
-- Naked
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Re: Exciting news about the Subversion Handbook...
Posted by Paul Lussier <pl...@lanminds.com>.
In a message dated: Thu, 24 Oct 2002 18:17:49 CDT
Karl Fogel said:
>Now, the details:
>
>The authors are Ben Collins-Sussman, Mike Pilato, and Brian
>Fitzpatrick. They've signed a contract with O'Reilly to turn it into
>a much more complete work, with a real editing process, a professional
>indexer, etc.
Fantastic! I know this book will probably benefit from a very heavy
technical review from all here, but I'd like to volunteer my services
as a reviewer for the material when you and O'Reilly get that far.
(I've done this in the past, most notably for the Linux version of the
"sysadmin bible", The Linux Adminstration Handbook, by Evi Nemeth et al.)
That's all, now back to our regularly scheduled program :)
--
Seeya,
Paul
--
It may look like I'm just sitting here doing nothing,
but I'm really actively waiting for all my problems to go away.
If you're not having fun, you're not doing it right!
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Re: Exciting news about the Subversion Handbook...
Posted by "Glenn A. Thompson" <gt...@cdr.net>.
Coolness!
gat
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Re: Exciting news about the Subversion Handbook...
Posted by Garrett Rooney <ro...@electricjellyfish.net>.
On Thursday, October 24, 2002, at 07:17 PM, Karl Fogel wrote:
> Some nice news, everyone: O'Reilly & Associates will be publishing
> "Subversion: The Definitive Guide", based on the Handbook sitting in
> our tree.
rock on! i was wondering how long it would take for that to happen ;-)
> So over the next few days, they'll be importing the sources of the new
> Guide, which contains all the material in the Handbook plus more.
> Note that the Guide is written in DocBook XML, so those who want to
> build the documentation themselves will have to install a few more
> tools (I've already done it, it's not hard). The DocBook DTD is quite
> easy to learn, and if you had any doubts whether it's worth switching,
> they will be erased when you see the new PDF/PostScript output. It's
> *beautiful*, a whole different universe from what we were getting from
> Texinfo.
excellent! having our documentation in docbook format has always been
something i've wanted to see. the output from docbook tools is light
years cooler looking than anything texinfo can provide.
i guess now i know why you guys were trying to get suggestions in #svn
on how to get docbook stuff set up that time ;-)
-garrett
--
garrett rooney Remember, any design flaw you're
rooneg@electricjellyfish.net sufficiently snide about becomes
http://electricjellyfish.net/ a feature. -- Dan Sugalski
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Re: Exciting news about the Subversion Handbook...
Posted by Karl Fogel <kf...@newton.ch.collab.net>.
Noel Yap <ya...@yahoo.com> writes:
> Will they get royalties? If they do, it'll be more of
> an incentive for me to get it :-) Thanks guys, and
> congrats.
They will, though believe me: book royalties are enough to pay for a
few extra toppings, but not the whole pizza :-).
> One question: Will this be purely 1.0, or will there
> be a chapter pointing out near-future work.
I imagine it'll just always contain whatever's true at that moment in
the sources (with the usual lag time, of course). And whatever it
contains when it first goes to press, that's what gets printed. :-)
But MikeFitzBen can answer this with more certainty.
-K
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Re: Exciting news about the Subversion Handbook...
Posted by Noel Yap <ya...@yahoo.com>.
--- Karl Fogel <kf...@newton.ch.collab.net> wrote:
> The authors are Ben Collins-Sussman, Mike Pilato,
> and Brian
> Fitzpatrick. They've signed a contract with
> O'Reilly to turn it into
> a much more complete work, with a real editing
> process, a professional
> indexer, etc. They're responsible for providing
> O'Reilly with the
> material by a certain date, thus their names are on
> the cover. (And,
> I should point out, they've already started and have
> been working late
> nights for quite a while now.)
Will they get royalties? If they do, it'll be more of
an incentive for me to get it :-) Thanks guys, and
congrats.
One question: Will this be purely 1.0, or will there
be a chapter pointing out near-future work.
Thanks,
Noel
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