Date: Wed, 14 Oct 1998 23:16:22 +0100 From: Nik Clayton <nik@nothing-going-on.demon.co.uk> To: Eivind Eklund <eivind@yes.no>, "Robert A. Bruce" <rab@cdrom.com>, doc@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Publishing the FreeBSD Handbook and FAQ Message-ID: <19981014231622.42306@nothing-going-on.org> In-Reply-To: <19981013133644.50562@follo.net>; from Eivind Eklund on Tue, Oct 13, 1998 at 01:36:44PM %2B0200 References: <199810080459.VAA15607@pike.cdrom.com> <19981013133644.50562@follo.net>
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On Tue, Oct 13, 1998 at 01:36:44PM +0200, Eivind Eklund wrote:
> On Wed, Oct 07, 1998 at 09:59:34PM -0700, Robert A. Bruce wrote:
> > Howdy,
> > We are planning to print books containing the FreeBSD Handbook and FAQ.
<snip>
> If you have some amount of manpower, it would be prudent to go through
> the entire handbook and 'take notes' of what needs to be changed.
>
> Ideally, the entire handbook should have a careful editor go through
> and fix it to
> (1) Have the same style throughout (language choices)
> (2) Have each section organized in a 'build-up' fashion, starting from
> almost no assumptions about what the user knows (or references to
> what should have been read before) and building up to the full
> gory details.
> (3) Be fully marked up in DocBook instead of LinuxDoc.
> (4) Contain relevant illustrations.
>
> Nik Clayton <nik@freebsd.org> has started doing point 3 - I don't know
> when he'll be finished
People occasionally ask me this, and then I shuffle my feet and look
guilty. Suffice to say that John Fieber's original estimate of 3 hours
is looking a little off :-)
Still to do is
- 2/3rds of the markup conversion for examples (I just committed the
first lot)
- The remaining markup changes
- Syncronisation with the current version of the Handbook.
- Splitting into individual files.
The biggest problem at the moment is that in real life I have roughly
two evenings a week I can give to FreeBSD. If (as happened tonight)
the public transport screws up (for example) that time drops to 0, and
I've lost a day.
The first entry in that list (the markup conversion) is largely automatic,
it just can't be easily automated. It needs someone to look at each
example and make a judgement call about how it should be marked up. If
anyone wants to lend a hand with this (it's boring, tedious, work, but
if you're in the UK I'll buy you a beer or two, and if my contracting
business takes off sufficiently that I can afford to do this elsewhere
in the world I'll make a point of flying over and buying you a beer in
two years time :-) ) get in touch to nik@freebsd.org, and I'll put
together something explaining how this bit is done.
The remaining markup changes should (in theory) go much faster. After
talking with the Japanese translation team, I'm going to switch the
way I'm doing the conversions -- instead of trying to fix every similar
item of markup in one sweep, and then go through the Handbook again
looking for different markup, fixing that, and going through the Handbook
*again* looking for different markup, I'll make one more pass through
it fixing up *everything* I can see. This'll probably result in two or
three large commits (hmm, even the last one was ~ 1,500 lines in size)
but then the vast majority of the thing will be done.
> or if he would be willing to do some of the other tasks for money. Nik?
I would be very willing to do the other tasks for money (if for no other
reason than that I can then do them during the day, and not need to
administer a Y2K lab full of Sun machines, which is what I'm doing at
the moment).
Unfortunately, the earliest I'm realistically available for this sort of
work is 16th December, which is definitely outside their time window.
N
--
C.R.F. Consulting -- we're run to make me richer. . .
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