On Wed, Nov 06, 2002 at 09:37:12AM -0600, Ben Collins-Sussman wrote:
> > My vote is for keeping things exactly as they are today, with the
> > optional addition (by someone other than me) of a more regular posting
> > of perhaps just the HTML version of the work-in-progress. Then Ben,
> > Fitz, and I can decide on good places to snapshot the book to replace
> > the less-often-updated milestone PDF, HTML and PS versions.
>
> I guess, then, that I'm going to keep my patches to myself for a
> loooong time. I write in disorganized pieces, I move things around,
> make multiple passes, and so on. In the status quo, I have to be sure
> to commit only things that keep the book in a perfectly coherent
> state. I'd much rather commit early and often, but I don't want to
> "break" the readability of the book.
In this case, I'd like to withdraw my first suggestion. Sitting on
patches will only make things worse. At least with the current
situation, people can get the sources and see where they're at.
My issue is that I was planning on doing some work on the very chapters that
are now essentially 'locked' by folks doing massive rewrites. I'm happy to
wait for those changes, but I was mainly looking for a way to follow along
passively, i.e. not having to compile the book myself just in order to see
the formatted revisions.
It's a minor issue, but a much bigger issue would be if the people doing
the rewrites made their changes completely unavailable, in order to
avoid the very thing I was hoping would bring those changes to me more
quickly.
So, if I can put the cat back in the bag, I'd be happy to drop this thread
right now.
Be well,
Zack
>
> The real issue here, I guess, is deciding what it exactly what it
> means to present 'stability' to the world. Does it mean
>
> 1. the book's source code is coherent?, or
> 2. the compiled versions published on the web site are coherent?
>
> If we go with #2, then yeah, I guess we just need to publish compiled
> versions much less often, at specific points of stability. But then I
> feel bad about blocking everyone else: "no sorry, you can't post a new
> PDF, because we're not at a writing checkpoint yet." That's why I was
> advocating a branch.
>
>
--
Zack Brown
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Received on Wed Nov 6 19:25:58 2002