ubuntu-developer-manual team mailing list archive

[Didier Roche <didrocks@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On ven., 2010-12-03 at 13:08 -0600, Belinda Lopez wrote:
> Here are my meeting notes for anyone who couldn't make it today.  HUGE 
> thanks to all who did!!  Please add any comments - should I post these 
> to Planet?
> 
> 
> Ubuntu Developer Manual, aka The Ubuntu Opportunistic Developer Guide
[…]
> 
>     5. Any other issues? - Ack, forgot to bring up the "official" book 
> title!  - BaL will send an email to the list to finalize.
> 

Hey everyone.

First, sorry to not have been available for this call, but I was in
another meeting around this "obscure unity thing",  not sure what it
is. :)
Sorry if I then repeat something that was already discussed in the
meeting.

More seriously, just to give some feedback around the "let's take the
text in plain text mode and then, carry yourself the LaTeX translation".
I'm talking as the author of "Simple Comme Ubuntu"[1] (which can be
translated as "Easy like Ubuntu" in English). It's a book for beginners
of 350 pages about ubuntu, in LaTeX, under CC:BY-SA that I update since
ubuntu 6.06 and that is available online. It can be found as an ubuntu
package (apt-get install simplecommeubuntu in universe) and also it can
be bought once printed (as a lot of people seems to prefer a paper
version).
I'm updating it every 6 month with each release (so, we are at the 9th
edition). This book, more or less, became the "official ubuntu book" in
France as being a community book. There is also a bzr branch in
https://launchpad.net/simplecommeubuntu and you can just type "make" to
have it built.

So, I think it is in a very similar state than the ubuntu developer
manual in term of technologies and choices. So, giving some feedbacks on
the contribution I got over the years.

As you can imagine, each new release is still a lot of work and take
something like 50 hours. I tried to engage the community offering them a
"LaTeX" translation on my side, but apart from rereading and typo fixes,
I have not a lot of luck on that. People seems to be afraid to give even
full plain text and prefer to give some correction or rephrase than
writing in a particular area. I learnt to cope with it and try to give a
first quick draft on, for instance, indicators when they appeared, and
then only I got feedback and improved the content. "Showing the
direction" seems to have been the right choice for my usecase.

And this, despite the fact the book is recommended on the french forum
(more than 150 000 members) and is well known. My point is that getting
autonomous contributors there is hard and we always have to draw the
line to help newcomers. A first quick draft and then incremental
improvements are needed.

However, it's easy to get screenshots update (Simple Comme Ubuntu has
approximately 300 images as having a glossary of applications/games).
The end of that is to triage the images in its own chapter and then ask
for contribution. This will help to get updates as we will surely what
should be taken into account from the start for the future.

Hope this experience feedback can help :)
Cheers,
Didier

[1] http://www.framabook.org/ubuntu.html