[TOS] Textbook update

[Greg DeKoenigsberg]

1. SCM chapter draft, and comments.

I spent almost a month on the Source Code Management chapter.  I was 
trying to give an overview of the four major SCMs that I believed people 
would run into: cvs, svn, git and hg.  After many long nights, I finally 
decided that the approach was too confusing.  I also had a good look at 
some other content out there, and much of it was way better than I could 
have come up with.

Lesson: writing all your own content for a FOSS textbook, when other good 
content exists and is freely licensed, is incredibly stupid.  A lesson I 
learn and re-learn over and over.

Therefore, I decided to start over with the SCM chapter, and to focus on 
one SCM: Subversion.  I stole liberally from the excellent free O'Reilly 
svn book (with attribution, of course), taking the content I believe will 
be best suited for a beginner, breaking it up and applying exercises to 
each section.  I think the flow is *much* better, and I'm pleased with the 
initial results.

I would consider the chapter 95% done.  The other 5% is a bit of cleanup, 
and getting the exercises themselves correct -- which is going to require 
us to put up a svn repository at TOS.  Chris Tyler has agreed to set this 
up -- so Chris, I think we're gonna need this soon-ish.  :)

===

2. Other chapters, and help.

Writing content from scratch is slow, and hard work, and people are busy.

Editing and curating content that has already been written is somewhat 
less slow, and somewhat less hard.  :)

Thus, here's the help I'd like for now:

a. If you're working on a chapter, keep working please, and let's see a 
working draft and an estimate percentage complete, so we know where we 
are.  I'd like to have a first draft of the entire book by Monday, March 
1st -- which is 19 days from now.  If we can't get there, I at least want 
to get close.

b. If you're not working on a chapter but have seen good openly licensed 
content that might fit into a chapter, *please* give a heads-up.

===

3. Moving from FLOSS Manuals.

I believe it's time to move away from FLOSS Manuals.

Having worked extensively with the FLOSS Manuals infrastructure over the 
last several weeks, I just don't feel like it adds enough value.  It's a 
great tool for gathering writers to collaborate, especially writers who 
like wysiwyg tools.  But I found it cumbersome, and more than once its 
interface quirks lost hours of my work -- and since I prefer to do most of 
my work offline anyway, it just wasn't adding that much value for me. 
Having talked with some other authors who are running into similar issues, 
I feel like it's best to just move the text onto TOS.  Most everyone who 
would be contributing to this text knows MediaWiki markup, and there are 
lots of tools to migrate from Mediawiki markup to Docbook or what have 
you.  While it may not be perfect, I believe it's the right solution for 
right now.

The chapter list that lives here:

http://teachingopensource.org/index.php/Textbook_Roadmap#TODO:_finish_First_Draft_of_every_chapter

...should now be considered authoritative.  Tridge, I see that you've been 
working on the legal chapter, so we just need to figure out where to fit 
that in.

--g

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