Thursday, July 1, 2010

Tools for the writing process

Now that the ZODB book is on the planning stages and writing will start soon, it's a good time to think about what tools will be used for writing it.

I propose to use Sphinx to generate the documentation. The text will probably be stored in a Subversion repository, which could be svn.zope.org, for example. All of the book code will also live in a repository. I'm not opposed to the use of Github or Bitbucket if most people think that's the way to go, but personally I find I can get by with the above mentioned tools.

After we have at least a couple of chapters in a presentable state, the documentation could be automatically generated every day, so we can start to have a (slightly) useful resource well before the book is finished. We might be able to give the book a home like book.zodb.org or something.

Right now I'm not sure about whether we should use a wiki or an issue tracker, but it's something that could become useful if more people participate as voluntary reviewers of the book.

Well, this is how I see the writing process at the moment. Am I missing something? Do you have any ideas or suggestions? I'm willing to consider other options if that would get more people participating in the process.

3 comments:

  1. maybe you didn't know but github supports git, hg and svn ... so you can give contributors freedom to choose the tools for them self. well but most important is that you are feeling good with the choice :) good luck

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  2. Yeah, I didn't know that. I will take a look. Thanks.

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  3. If you use Sphinx, how about to provide an ePub file additionally? Put it up on iBookStore, too.

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