Re: Hosting of the cookbook

MJ Ray wrote:

> On 2004-04-22 02:22:43 +0100 Francisco Solsona <[email protected]> wrote:
>
>> Ummm... not so sure about the daft situation, but I can assure you that
there are people working already on several (albeit basic) recipes.
[...]
>
> So what is going on? I am being told contradicting things again. This
makes me unhappy.

Sorry if I gave a misleading impression.  Francisco's right, many recipes
have been written, and continue to be written - see the WebChanges page
for the most recent ones.

What I meant about the "proof of concept" and so on is that if anyone
doesn't like something that I or someone else does, then they should say
so, suggest alternatives, etc.  In the absence of that kind of feedback,
we have all been moving forward.  The questions you have raised have all
been valid, and I think we want to address them all in some way or
another, but so far nothing has been raised that seems to require us to
halt progress until we've resolved more of the issues.

For the record, if we do decide to shift direction before making the
cookbook more public, I hereby volunteer to convert the recipes that have
been written so far, into whatever new format we decide on.  It really
isn't that big a deal - it's the kind of thing you can do with some regexp
scripts, which is exactly what I did to convert the original cookbook from
WebIt.  Whether there are 40 pages or 150 to convert doesn't really
matter.

> 1. If this is an active book already and people are charging off in the
wrong direction, then fine, you go get on with it and I'll shut up,
bypassed.

The book is active in the sense that a few of the original Schematics
members have been writing recipes.  I don't see any charging off in the
wrong direction.  Questions like whether the cookbook should be
annotation-based are pretty moot currently, given the limited group of
authors involved, and given that they will all presumably be editors when
the cookbook goes public.

I'm perfectly willing to entertain the idea that we're going in a wrong
direction, but to be convinced of that, I'd need to see alternatives.  I'm
really not sure what you're suggesting we should actually *do*.

> Having explored what is there a little more, getting
> that answer now is the end for me. I'll go do something else useful
instead while you create big deferred project and editing work. Run,
run, run off the clifftops and good luck adjusting the flight as you go.
Never know: it might just work.

I'm planning to do what I can to make it work.  I think that's the real
point here.

> 2. If this is a proof of concept, then great, let's get the concepts
right soon. Editing and release production (input and output) need
simplifying to fit the stated "lightweight" aim.

Compared to WebIt in CVS, we've already made a significant improvement in
"lightweightness".  The recipes that Francisco, Jens, Gordon and Noel have
contributed testify to that.  We do need to write up the process in a way
that's geared towards people who haven't been involved from the beginning,
and we'll be doing that.  We'll also streamline the process where we can.

Regarding output, I'm of the opinion that the cookbook's structure is
likely to evolve even after it goes public.  Producing an HTML version
should be fairly straightforward using wget, as Noel suggested.  An
informal PDF version should be similarly simple, e.g. by printing pages to
PDF.  A real, printed book is something that we're going to have to keep
an eye on as a target as the project evolves.

Are we deferring some work?  Sure.  But I don't think we're creating a big
project that wouldn't exist otherwise.

> Basic project
> monitoring questions need more knowledge of what the system can
> produce than I have. I seem to get a bit stuck with the way this is
strangely like a wiki, but not a wiki. "PureWikiFans" was definitely the
wrong name for me to use, eh?

A major reason I suggested TWiki was in response to something you said:
"If it goes entirely wiki, we must have good revision control for the
maintainers."  That's one of TWiki's strengths.

If we should be considering something else, we either need concrete
proposals, or someone to commit to doing the research to find something.

Re the project management questions on the AdminOverview page:

> * What is the desired progress of this project?
> * How can we measure that?
> * What measurements do we expect if everything is running as desired?

My feeling is that we can play all of these things by ear.  The big point
here is what exactly do we have to lose?  None of us are betting our life
savings on the success of this project.  If it stumbles at first, we'll
fix it and move on.

> * What do we expect to see if one of the alternative
> suggested development models is more appropriate?

I think we'll know it when we see it.  If a great deal of editing or
policing proves necessary, for example, the annotation approach might
become attractive even to those of us who want to take the "permissive by
default" approach to start with.

Anton



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