svnbook : how not to be overwhelmed

Ben Collins-Sussman sussman at red-bean.com
Sat Dec 23 19:16:16 CST 2006


I sat down to work on book stuff tonight, and I thought, "gee, how
hard can it be to do some fixin' up of our new introductory chapter?"
After about 5 minutes of poking around, I was suddenly paralyzed like
a deer-in-headlights.  The problem is that there are TOO MANY sources
of 'work' to be done.  I'm actually having trouble keeping track of
them.

So, in Bennish fashion, I made a list of things to check when
rewriting a chapter.  I think we should all be looking over these 5
sources as we work.  (Have I forgotten any?)

  * New Outline

    Rearranging stuff usually means things need to be reworked to flow
    properly, from one section to the next.

  * Our TODO file

    This file lives in our svnbook-private repos, and is full of
    critiques from cmpilato.

  * The 1.3/1.4 releasenotes

    We still need to bring the book from 1.2 to 1.4.  The releasenotes
    are pretty darn detailed already;  their content simply needs to
    be migrated/expanded into the proper chapters.

  * Trac tickets

    Currently about 17 tickets full of patches/suggestions for
    improvement.

  * "Ripple Effect"

    Sometimes making drastic changes to the chapter you're focusing on
    causes changes to be required in a totally different chapter.  If
    you're not willing to take a detour to the other chapter, then at
    least file a ticket to remember to do it later.


I now feel like the situation is much more under control.  If I can
say that I've gone down and searched the sources in this list, then my
current chapter is doing pretty well.

Maybe we should put this in the svnbook-private repos?




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