RE: The future of the Subversion book - Thank-you
Mike, Thank-you for all your work with subversion. It is a lot of work and we would not have the tool we have today without the effort of people like you. Regards, Luke Perkins 2581 Flagstone Drive San Jose, CA 95132 Cell: 719-339-0987 -Original Message- From: C. Michael Pilato Sent: Wednesday, September 5, 2018 12:39 PM To: dev@subversion.apache.org Subject: The future of the Subversion book Hello, all! It's been a long while since I interacted with any degree of regularity with this community, and I've had to come to terms with some essential truths. First, my time as an active Subversion developer has *definitely* passed. Oh, I may get a chance to return to it at some point in the (likely distant) future, but without CollabNet commissioning my efforts here, I simply don't have the extra cycles these days to offer. Given that my contributions over the last few years can be measured in the smallest of numbers, this isn't news to anyone here and certainly has no effect on the trajectory and velocity of the project! Of greater concern to (at least) myself is that the cognitive distance I have from Subversion these days -- combined with the craziness of just life as an twice-employed[1], soccer-coaching, father of three -- means that the Subversion book is getting next-to-zero attention, too. Oh, I'm still paying attention to the work our translators are doing, and wordsmithing here and there as concerns are raised. But the (as-yet-unfinished) trunk of the book is still attached to Subversion 1.8, which means that this community has pounded out all kinds of improvements whose documentation is mostly limited to release notes and email threads. Put simply, the service that Ben and Fitz (both long gone from contributing to the book at all) and I formerly offered to the wider Subversion community has arguably now become a disservice. I'm done telling myself that I can fix this by re-engaging and taking up authorship again. That just isn't gonna happen. It's time to pass the torch to someone else, and I would love to immediately begin tossing around some ideas toward this end. To be clear, red-bean.com is happy to continue hosting the book's HTML/PDF builds. The source lives at SourceForge these days, and I can grant commit permissions (or transfer ownership) as needed. Moreover, there's no deadline for maintainership handoff that I'm trying to impose or anything. I want to do what's best for the Subversion ecosystem, whatever this community determines that to be. Feel free to consider alternate approaches, too, such as conversion of the book's content into a Wiki. But I would caution against doing anything that discourages or complicates the workflow of the book's translators, especially since they are the only ones actually doing anything in the project at all! :-) So what do you think? -- Mike [1] Beyond my regular CollabNet work week, I give additional hours as a member of the staff of my local church.
Re: The future of the Subversion book
On 06.09.2018 15:10, C. Michael Pilato wrote: > On 09/05/2018 04:49 PM, Mark Phippard wrote: >> Assuming the PMC wanted it, is it possible for the book to be >> contributed to this project and hosted in the Apache SVN repository? >> Many people seem to post questions and issues in these mailing lists >> as if it is part of the project anyway so maybe we ought to just >> make this the reality. I guess what I am saying is, before we gauge >> opinion on whether we want to bring this into the project, my >> question is whether there are any blockers that prevent this on the >> book side from being an option? Such as copyright or licensing >> issues that make it not possible. It feels like this has been >> discussed in the past and there were reasons it was kept separate >> from the project even after the publishing of the book by O'Reilly >> was in the past, but I no longer recall them. > > Honestly, I think the book belongs with the PMC. It is easy to imagine a > day when a developer is expected to provide at least rudimentary > documentation updates in the same commit that carries his or her new > feature or behavioral change. > > The book carries a cc-by-2.0 license, with Ben, Fitz and myself named as > the copyright holders. I suspect that in order to be absorbed by the > PMC, that licensing would have to change to an Apache License. Does that > mean that the three primary authors would need to officially re-license > it somehow? Or maybe it's a software grant to the ASF (rather like > Subversion itself was)? We'd have to ask legal@ but I'd be surprised if we'd be required to re-license the book; it's not code, and the Apache license isn't really suitable. Also we wouldn't really be making releases of it, just updates on the web. -- Brane
Re: The future of the Subversion book
On 09/05/2018 04:49 PM, Mark Phippard wrote: Assuming the PMC wanted it, is it possible for the book to be contributed to this project and hosted in the Apache SVN repository? Many people seem to post questions and issues in these mailing lists as if it is part of the project anyway so maybe we ought to just make this the reality. I guess what I am saying is, before we gauge opinion on whether we want to bring this into the project, my question is whether there are any blockers that prevent this on the book side from being an option? Such as copyright or licensing issues that make it not possible. It feels like this has been discussed in the past and there were reasons it was kept separate from the project even after the publishing of the book by O'Reilly was in the past, but I no longer recall them. Honestly, I think the book belongs with the PMC. It is easy to imagine a day when a developer is expected to provide at least rudimentary documentation updates in the same commit that carries his or her new feature or behavioral change. The book carries a cc-by-2.0 license, with Ben, Fitz and myself named as the copyright holders. I suspect that in order to be absorbed by the PMC, that licensing would have to change to an Apache License. Does that mean that the three primary authors would need to officially re-license it somehow? Or maybe it's a software grant to the ASF (rather like Subversion itself was)? I don't know.
Re: The future of the Subversion book
On 09/05/2018 04:10 PM, Daniel Shahaf wrote: Can we identify specific tasks that interested volunteers can pick up? Initial draft: - Respond to bug reports as they come in - Liaise with translators - Add content about from the <1.8/1.9/1.10/1.11> release - Bring the book up-to-speed with _all_ new features since 1.8 or 1.9 (?) - Go through the issue tracker backlog (is there one?) Your list is a pretty complete one. I'd add, perhaps, "Maintain the website" (which implies ensuring that the nightly builds are working). Yes, there is an issue tracker: https://sourceforge.net/p/svnbook/tickets/ I've used the issue tracker not merely for bug reports, but also for the work of trying to update the text with respect to new features or behaviors as new Subversion releases come out. The milestones in the tracker are pretty straightforward: "en-1.8" is something that needs to be fixed in the English version of the book that covers Subversion 1.8, e.g. (You won't find "en-1.9" -- I'd planned to skip the 1.9 version and go straight to 1.10.) I also have a "whenever" milestone for stuff that can isn't tied to a specific version, and an "unlikely" milestone for stuff that I was on the fence about even entertaining. I also used the project's wiki tool to track the high-level documentation process: https://sourceforge.net/p/svnbook/wiki/ProjectOverview/ If you cruise over some of the pages there, you'll see the exact process that I (and formerly Ben, Fitz, and others) used to manage the documentation of each new version of Subversion. -- Mike
