Re: you know...

[Sriram Ramkrishna <sri ramkrishna me>]

On Fri, Feb 6, 2015 at 2:36 AM, Ekaterina Gerasimova
<kittykat3756 gmail com> wrote:
> On 06/02/2015, Sriram Ramkrishna <sri ramkrishna me> wrote:
> > You know just having an IDE is not enough, it would be great if we
> > could get someone to write a a book or something on gnome development
> > that we can sell and use the proceeds to fund GNOME.
>
> It would be great, but writing a good book takes a lot of time and
> effort so I would find it surprising if someone was to write one and
> donate the rights to GNOME. If it happens, great, but it doesn't seem
> likely.

Indeed.  Also, it will be out of date a year after publishing given
how fast we are developing new things.

> Another approach would be to organise something along the lines of a
> book sprint. These basically work a bit like a very targeted, short
> hackfests. The first day is spent planning out the index, splitting it
> into short chapters and letting the attendees pick what they're
> working on. The second day is writing (usually 1-2 chapters per
> person) and the third day is for reviewing. By the fourth day, we had
> a short, published book in our hands. This did inspire a similar
> approach from the documentation team towards some of the devel docs in
> the last year which were written as relatively self-contained guides
> with examples and could be taken for a book quite easily. The key to
> organising something like this is to get the leading developers into
> one room.

I really like this method.  I think it might be worth investing in
that.  Mostly because this is probably the best way to have a
sustained, up to date model.  We just need to identify the core things
tha won't change.  We could use Builder as the basis of that writing
since there is going to be a lot of helper stuff in Builder that will
make writng things like gobject code easier. (according to builder
page)

> The other issue to consider if that our toolkit and even application
> design change quite quickly so the book would become outdated fast.

Yeah, and this is quite true...  that's why I like your idea, it
becomes part of the development cycle.  The only problem doing it from
a 'community' perspective is that we won't be able to write things in
a single 'voice'.  Or rather, we will need a good editor that can warp
it into a single voice.  It is a little off putting when one chapter
is using a different set of word choices than another because say one
speaker is English and the other is American or Canadian.  (a nod to
you making fun of each other's pronunciations of english words. :-)

> One way around this is to use an on-demand printing service so that we
> don't have to hold books in stock.

Makes sense.  I like these innovative ideas!

If we were to do something like that.. what kind of resources would be
required and do we have them and is it on someone's radar?

sri
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