On Mon, Jun 28, 2010 at 02:33:14PM -0700, tosmaillist.neophyte_...@ordinaryamerican.net wrote:
I'm going to trim out the top of your well-reasoned comments, because
I generally don't disagree with them. I want to focus on your
conclusion, which actually draws from an underlying thesis:
> In my opinion, a tool set review and switch is a very good idea at
> this stage of the project.
That seems to presume that a switch is called for. Yet, none of the
people who are actually working on the textbook have asked for a tool
review or switch, not that I know of. So, yes, if a switch was called
for, then this is definitely the prefered time to do it. But if it's
not called for, then it's a distraction from our important mission.
Authors: Do any of you have problems with the tools we have? Enough
that you've considered us switching? Now is a great time to mention
it. :)
The only I've heard of and complained about myself are when we have an
availability problem with teachingopensource.org, which is a hosting
problem. That is a situation that a few of us are working on solving,
not sure if that information has gone to this list. I don't think it
helps to go to another web service when that isn't the source of the
problem.
Our situation is:
1. Teachers are hampered _right_now_ from teaching open source
participation because of the lack of teaching materials for that
specific subject.
2. This textbook provides that, in a flawed way. The flaws have very
little to do with the toolchain.
3. 0.9 release is focused on fixing those flaws and improving what we
have. Incorporating any feedback is good, too, but lack of
feedback will not block progress.
4. At least two different teachers, and possibly more, are planning to
use the textbook with classes starting this fall (after August.)
Based on that, I do not think a tool review and switch is more
important than getting the next version of this book out on time for
those classes. Do students care what tools we use? The teachers?
They care if they have a textbook they can download or not.
Regarding data migration to another platform, that does not scare me
in the least.[1] This textbook, even full and complete, is only a
small amount of content. If I pledge to personally make sure that a
conversion happens if we choose a new tool for the textbook, does that
resolve your concern here?
- Karsten
[1] I was one of the project leads in the conversion of nearly 10,000
pages from MoinMoin wiki to MediaWiki. I was the lead writer for
converting over 5,000 pages of FrameMaker-sourced HTML in to
DocBook XML. I've manually converted hundreds of pages of plain
text, wiki text, and HTML to DocBook SGML and XML. I'm confident
that our textbook won't be a problem to convert to another source
format.
--
name: Karsten 'quaid' Wade, Sr. Community Gardener
team: Red Hat Community Architecture
uri: http://TheOpenSourceWay.org/wiki
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