Re: Hosting of the cookbook

On 2004-04-23 22:21:04 +0100 Anton van Straaten 
<[email protected]> wrote:

> I stand by all of those statements.  If you're taking these as me
> challenging you personally, you're missing my point entirely.

If I remove the challenges to build/show concrete examples, then there 
isn't much in most of your replies.

> you've posed questions without offering an opinion on those
> yourself (other than a sort of implicit one), and without giving much 
> to
> go on as to what you have in mind.

Sometimes this is because I have an open mind as to how the problem is 
best solved. Prejudicing a discussion doesn't seem helpful.

> I'm finding it difficult to respond to those questions.  When I 
> responded
> to some of them with "we can play that by ear", you feel I'm 
> stonewalling
> discussion.

Yes, it's along the lines of "How should we solve this? What is the 
aim here?" being answered by "We can solve it later." It doesn't 
actually answer the questions at all and barely relates to them.

>> An online book.
> OK.  What is it about what you consider to be an online book, that 
> would
> not be addressed by the kind of site layout we're currently working
> towards?

Hard to say, as I have little grasp of the "kind of site layout we're 
currently working towards".

> Is there some way in which a simplistic mirror of such a site
> would not meet the requirements for an online book?

wget doesn't even gather all page objects. For example, @import-ed CSS 
files get missed IIRC.


> I'm not looking to make this organization mechanism into a big 
> project.  I
> think it can be kept small, simple, and focused on producing what the
> cookbook needs.

There seems little interest in discussing what the cookbook needs. 
Appealing to being focused on it seems groundless.


>> I'm asking questions because if no questions are asked, then there is
>> no understanding. I cannot give SMART targets, because there is no
>> definition worth the name yet. There's no point having us all posting
>> "I think we should do X" with no reasoning as to why we should be
>> doing that.
> Great, please feel free to give your reasoning, too.  I've been 
> trying to
> do that as best I can, myself.

The bug is the lack of definition! Without that, there can be no 
rational reasoning. Trying to explore this definition is where we came 
in.

> Right.  Having led some significant software projects, I think I have 
> a
> reasonable handle on such things.  However, part of what we're dealing
> with here is that we can't verify all our assumptions up front, and we
> can't be sure that we're doing the right things. [...]

We could record what assumptions we are making and figure out how we 
might verify them.

> the first prototype might need to be thrown away.

We already seem to have done that. How many will be thrown away before 
we actually try to learn from the discarded?

> I think the construction and the path are intertwined.  The features 
> and
> limits of the tools we use to do the construction will affect the 
> path.

Indeed. The construction mustn't be allowed to limit analysis of the 
path, even if it limits the path. That analysis may suggest 
improvements to the construction.

> So far, I've gathered that you think we should halt activity until 
> we've
> agreed on the "path [to] a published book".

What? Searching my sent email for this view doesn't find it. Are you 
inventing opinions for me? I think you should address the basic 
questions early on, not all stop until there is a Grand Plan.

This is probably my last batch of email on this topic for a while, 
because I am away at conference next week and there are more useful 
things to do this weekend. Good luck, but I think it needs more than 
that.

-- 
MJR/slef     My Opinion Only and possibly not of any group I know.
Please http://remember.to/edit_messages on lists to be sure I read
http://mjr.towers.org.uk/ gopher://g.towers.org.uk/ [email protected]
  Creative copyleft computing services via http://www.ttllp.co.uk/


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