On Wed, Feb 17, 2010 at 12:36:19AM -0500, Pat Farrell wrote:
> I've never yet found a good developer who is good at writing
> documentation. I've been doing this for nearly 40 years.
I do actually tend to like writing documentation sometimes.
No idea if it's really any good. But I've been contributing to
the book, and I sometimes commit changes to it after answering
questions from users which had trouble following some part of the book.
Unfortunately we have nobody dedicated to maintaining just the book
(apart from translators). It would be great to have one or more
regular contributors to the English version of the book who do not
also work on Subversion itself. You just qualified yourself for this
task, by the way (as well as any non-developers you happen to know who
are good at writing documentation).
> Again, the mainline release of SVN is packaged, and this list keep
> telling folks that they should be using 1.6 or even 1.6.9
>
> So why is it so hard to have the release process include the current
> "release" documentation.
I agree that the situation with the book being separate from the
svn distribution itself is a bit unfortunate. But this is how it is.
And the book is pretty large, actually. It used to be managed within
subversion's subversion repository but was spinned off into a separate
project. So it's a separate download, which may be inconvenient.
But you can't claim there wasn't any documentation matching the release.
If you'd rather like to have a set of man pages or something equally
suitable for distribution with subversion source releases, maybe you
could come up with a way of extracting the necessary text from the
book's docbook source and convert it? I'd like that.
> Are you guys just being dense?
Pardon?
> Its a trivial request: match the release
> documentation to the release software.
Well, the nightly version is always up to date (i.e. it matches the
current release). And it's available online for free.
If you need it in print, you can print it yourself. You can even make
derivative versions of it and self-publish them. There's been versions
published in China and Germany, for instance, which the Subversion
project itself didn't even know about before they were published.
And we're pretty cool with that.
Or you could ask o'reilly to publish a new version if you want the
cute turtles on the cover. I guess that cover is copyrighted by them.
So far, the "releases" of the book have coincided with o'reilly
publishing a new edition.
Stefan
Received on 2010-02-17 10:17:22 CET