Nutshells, books and FAQs

[Christoph Haas]

John (et al),

On Sat, Nov 20, 2004 at 09:33:31AM -0600, John Hornbeck wrote:
> I was actually told that the book I was working on, would not work as
> the nutshell book. But that what myself and RobertJ are working on is
> needed.

Could you shed some light on what the differences are between the
"nutshell book" and what you have been doing lately? I still don't get
the picture.

> I have honestly thought of porting the entire Progeny Guide over to
> Ubuntu.  It is a very good manual.

Have you checked how much would need to be changed? I like that guide,
too, but it would probably be a lot of work porting it and watching the
changes. Are there so many differences between Ubuntu and Progeny that
it would justify the huge amount of work?

I could also imagine we leave the Progeny manual where it is even it's
not 100% Ubuntu compliant because we probably can't handle that until
Hoary. Starting an FAQ->Book transition would make enough sense IMHO.
And it's not much work really. Just that I hope we know who can work
where.

> I get more and more confused everyday. I think that I should be working
> on the book, but also trying to help maintain the faq, gnome-guide,
> wiki, and in the end I don't get much done because I am stretching
> myself to thin.

That's exactly my feeling currently, too. I just don't know where to do
what. And setting up the Wiki pages hasn't really improved the "what
goes where" problem.

> I think we can combine it all without any problem.  It would be a good
> thing also so that we can make sure everyone is on board with the whole
> idea and not just a few of us deciding what will go into it.

And still we can use the invidual knowlege of the people. I for example
could imagine getting a "Running services" (postfix, inetd, apache2,
...) chapter done.

> As of right now, I have only had about one person step up to help with
> this book, in the beginning people where saying I was wrong because I
> wanted to do it myself, so I took everyone's advice and opened it up for
> others to help me. Now noone has really put anything in.

This does not sound like a single person can handle it.

> I have no problem with this, but if this will be changed into a
> community mainly project it still needs to follow along the structure
> that is mainly there.

Can we take a look at it already? You probably introduced it already but
I forgot. :)

> We worked for quite a while to get the framework and such to
> where it is and I think it is very nice. I don't want to start from
> scratch and I don't think we have the time.

The framework could be exactly the structure we are looking for.

> Last note. Combining effort into this is a great idea, but we need not
> forget the other docs that are needing to be done. Such as "man pages",
> "gnome-docs", misc docs just laying around that could use some love, I
> know some people where saying Nautilus docs could really use some love.

We should not just have Wiki page on display about what's done. Sivan
has already started listing who's working on what. And I'm still
completely unsure how the ubuntufication of man page will happen. But I
think the Tech Team has just discussed that so there is probably not yet
a consensus.

> If we do this than it needs to be decided soon, because if we sit around
> and discuss it for a week, that is one more week where nothing is
> getting done.

Indeed. I admit I'm lazy. Give us a job! ;)

 Christoph
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