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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Received on Fri Oct 25 01:48:05 2002