On Mon, 2010-06-28 at 18:19 -0400, David Nalley wrote: > On Mon, Jun 28, 2010 at 5:33 PM, > <tosmaillist.neophyte_...@ordinaryamerican.net> wrote: > <snip> > > > All the above is my way of suggesting that maybe now is a better time > > to make a careful selection of our textbook creation tools rather than > > later, especially in light of the other discussion of how well > > 'Practical Open Source Software Exploration' 0.8 has been received, ( > > http://teachingopensource.org/pipermail/tos/2010-June/001283.html ). > > If you are setting August as the date for 0.9, having no feedback on > > the use of 0.8, I suggest your schedule is ambitious. Whether you > > present 0.8 or 0.9 at OSCON, you will be presenting a Work In > > Progress. Of course, even 1.0 will be a WIP since the subject matter > > will evolve. > > > > In my opinion, a tool set review and switch is a very good idea at > > this stage of the project. > > > > I snipped the schedule section, as I have largely been a lurker and > not done any of the work, and thus feel unqualified to tell those who > are doing it how to set their schedule. > > That said, I don't see a problem with a tool set review. As a matter > of fact, a good tool set review could be a boon for projects outside > TOS. I'd love to help with this review. Wanna stake a page on the TOS > wiki to work? > > > David
I'm of two minds here: (a) It's worthwhile doing a toolset review to ensure we're using the best approach. (b) The tools should be selected by the people doing the work, taking into account what they are most productive using. Approach (b) was used during the writing of 0.8 when gregdek noted (on IRC) that he'd lost a substantial amount of work due to failure-to-save on the flossmanuals site -- whether due to connectivity, unfamiliarity with the software, or other issues I'm not certain. He also noted that up to that point in the process the facility provided by flossmanuals was basically a wiki. Since Greg was doing most of the writing and editing, Karsten most of the copyediting and formatting, and most of the other authors were more familiar with other wiki software than the flossmanuals wiki, we switched to tools we knew well and were more productive using -- MediaWiki (tos.o), SVN, and the Publican toolchain. I think Karsten's the point man here (especially since Greg's attention has a new focus) and he should have final say in tool selection. A tool review could be useful input into that decision, but unless others are stepping up to the production end of this project, we've got to leave this as Karsten's call. A part of an earlier comment that got sniped is: > It's also been my experience that building data with a schedule-driven > choice of data manipulation tools locks in that tool set rather > permanently. Few people like to transcribe a large set of data they > have spent precious time creating. I'm pretty confident that we're not locking ourselves into anything evil here -- DocBook is one of the most-transformable formats available. -Chris _______________________________________________ tos mailing list tos@teachingopensource.org http://teachingopensource.org/mailman/listinfo/tos
