[OLPC library] process

[Seth Woodworth]

Adam,

I think that we're making a lot of progress here.  Overall I am amazingly
happy with the quality of the documentation.  I'm working with our dev team
going over sections, smoothing out some of the technicalities.  I'm also
working with a few other volunteers to really polish the text and formatting
of some of the final sections.  It's really coming together.  We're hoping
to have our shipable-html by Saturday.

But if we're going to get there we're going to need your help.  The next 50+
hours around here are going to be crunch time.  We're committed to finishing
our end of the work by the end of the week.  We've been running into some
issues, but I think we have a way to smooth things out.

In the short term, we're having some issues in the extreme separation of the
XO hardware manual and the Sugar software manual.  The problem is that the
chapters, as written, don't mix into a single whole manual.  The XO manual
explains a good deal of the Sugar networking system, but the good Network
View diagrams are deep in the Sugar manual.  Also, the UI elements like the
View Keys in the frame directly relate to the keys on the top row of the
keyboard.  And it's important in a well-structured manual to be able to
really show the connection between these two elements.

Some of the current chapters, as organized now, don't allow for this to
happen by chapter-remix.  The important sections are much smaller than
that.  We've picked out six or seven chapters from the current sugar manual
that we need to inject Hardware elements into directly.

Now we're very committed to the single-source concept.  That's why the
manual has been kicking around FM since the start of the year.  And it makes
continued sense for OLPC and Sugar to have somewhat separate manuals.  But
in the very-short-term we need to try something a little different.

If I'm understanding your tools correctly, the best way to facilitate this
is to create a fresh book for organization.  Into this new book we pull in
around 6 chapters from the Sugar manual and most of the XO manual.  We take
elements from the hardware sections, integrate them into the Sugar chapters
and generate the changed chapters we need, all to be remixed into the
overall OLPC: Sugar+XO output that we'll ship.

Come next week, after we produce our short term goal, we can work to
segregate out the hardware sections into chapters that flow better with the
Sugar narrative.  Also, by looking at some of your export tools, it looks
possible to place some of the XO sections in Sugar in <span id=>'s.  That
way they can easily be scripted to be pulled out or included based on the
export needs of a given manual. (ie, sugar can dump the <span id=>'s that
don't match what they want to export).

We're working on a very tight schedule here.  Can we ask you to set up this
new manual right away?  Things are going to be moving very quickly
tomorrow.  We would also like if Adam Holt and I can get twiki-admin, so we
can publish our changes and make any remixes of the TOC that might come up?
This manual can sit on the back end, non-public (or public) just so long as
we can export new edits quickly after we make them.  I don't want to screw
up the polished Sugar manual that's sitting on the front of the site.

--Seth

Also, could we talk in the morning about your .css?  I need to start
creating stand-alone navigation for our bundle.


On Wed, Sep 3, 2008 at 6:26 PM, adam hyde <adam at flossmanuals.net> wrote:

> hey Seth,
>
> How are you thinking of doing the layout? You are doing this by hand? We
> have a nifty remix mechanism that will make your life a lot easier...
>
> adam
>
>
>
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