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?
More information about the svnbook-dev
mailing list