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Re: subversion book - guided tour - repository creation missing

From: Ben Collins-Sussman <sussman_at_collab.net>
Date: 2004-04-21 15:54:46 CEST

On Wed, 2004-04-21 at 02:11, Dimitri Papadopoulos-Orfanos wrote:
> Hi,
>
> > Chapter 3 is a guided tour for the client usage only; it assumes you
> > already have a repository ready to go.
> >
> > If you look at the README file in the svn tree, the "Quickstart" section
> > does exactly what you describe.
>
> Is there anything equivalent in the book? It could be worth "copying"
> README into chapter 6.

Again, this is a philosophical problem. Assuming that you read chapter
5 before chapter 6, it will be plainly obvious how to create a
repository, lay out the structure, and import data into it. Chapter 6
then follows with an explanation of how to wrap a server process around
the repository. There's a certain logical flow to the way topics are
presented.

The problem is that the book teaches Subversion from a "top down"
approach, laying out the general ideas and covering a progression of
topics from a theoretical point of view. Lots of people like this style
of learning, but lots of people don't. Many people would rather "learn
by doing", a "bottom up" approach. These are the folks who want a
quick-start walkthrough on one piece of paper: make a repos, import,
check it out, and read the book sections only when they need to figure
out something specific.

My feeling is that putting that sort of "bottom up" guide into the book
would be very odd and out of place. That's why I bothered to add it to
the README file, and that's also why I'm writing a new document in
doc/user/ which is another "bottom up" doc (look for upcoming commits.)
I'm hoping to point all these learn-by-doing folks to these new
documents, rather than the book. These new docs are essentially a
re-indexing of book topics based on task, with links to relevant book
chapters.

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Received on Wed Apr 21 15:57:30 2004

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