[Packaging-handbook-project] Cooperation between Miriam's course on Debian packages and the Debian Packaging Handbook project

[François Févotte]

Hello,

On 8/29/07, Luca Brivio <lucab83 at infinito.it> wrote:
> Since she aims to provide a truly complete and thorough introduction to all
> aspects of developing Debian packages, this look like an outstanding chance
> for cooperating. While both contents and shape of her course and our handbook
> will in many ways differ, I think there's nevertheless enough interesting
> room to make things together.

This seems very interesting to me. I think it would be a huge waste of
time and effort if these two projects were led independently from one
another.

> I do mean writing, merging, editing and adapt
> text for our different purposes.

However, I am not much in favor of having two different versions of
text: it could take a very long time to spot the differences, merge
the different parts and adapt them to each project's goals. Although I
do not have yet any idea how this could be done, I think it would be
better to have a common base for both documents, and to consider each
document as a branch derived from it (much as a VCS would do). Then
there could be easy ways to propagate changes from one branch to the
other.
The first solution I can think of to do this would be to use a
text-based format for the documents and a VCS to manage the two
branches (svn, svk, bzr, ...?) but this also entails some drawbacks
(e.g. it's not compatible with the wiki that has been used for the
Debian handbook packaging project).

Cheers,
    François