What's going on with svnbook?

[C. Michael Pilato]

O'Reilly has agreed to print a second edition of Version Control with
Subversion, so Ben, Fitz, and I are in the process of catching up on
some lost time and Subversion version coverage.  As part of the planning
effort for this second edition, we took the opportunity to analyze the
structure and content of the first edition.  Besides some some minor
policy and voicing changes we agreed to make, we decided:

   * some section reorganization was in order.  Even as the primary
     authors, we were finding the book to be a bit of a spaghetti-
     like mess of cross-references and chapter-jumping.

   * to rename the actual source files in use, because names like
     'ch-basic-usage.xml' say so much more than 'ch-01.xml'.

   * to hop off of DocBook Lite, and use the full DocBook 4.4 DTD
     (which is the latest recommendation by O'Reilly).

In order to keep the disruption of trunk to a minimum, we did all the
renaming and reorganization off on a branch.  We also did the DocBook
4.4 cutover, just to see what kind of pain it was going to cause us.
(Turned out to be no big deal.)  Now that that is all done, we've
"merged" the work back to the trunk.  (I say "merged", but what I really
did was replace trunk/src/en with the branch's src/en directory -- keeps
the history cleaner.)

Over the next few months, you should expect to see many changes to the
book sources as we try to bring the information from covering almost-1.3
to fully 1.4, and possibly 1.5 if it happens to get released in time.
You might see broken builds; incomplete thoughts; lots of "### TODO"
comments spread about; etc.  We appreciate your patience.  And even
more, we appreciate your feedback.

Thanks.

-- 
C. Michael Pilato <cmpilato at red-bean.com>

"The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting.  It has
 been found difficult; and left untried."  -- G. K. Chesterton

-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 189 bytes
Desc: OpenPGP digital signature
URL: <http://www.red-bean.com/pipermail/svnbook-dev/attachments/20070103/497c6d61/attachment.sig>