Going to try a little experiment here. Wikis are great, rah rah instant collaboration and all... but gee LaTeX just seems so much better for putting together nice looking documents. Wouldn't be nice if one the community's best free Haskell tutorials were available under darcs, its LaTeX guts exposed to the world?
Now you can darcs get http://darcs.haskell.org/yaht and send your patches to me. I'm essentially forking YAHT here: we've got the yaht-wikibook on one hand, and yaht-darcs on another; with eric occasionally scurrying around to hand-migrate patches from one tine to the other. yaht-wikibook is GFDL. yaht-darcs is dual-licensed Hal copyright-GFDL. Oh and btw, update your links. The new PDF is also on darcs.haskell.org: http://darcs.haskell.org/yaht/yaht.pdf.
WikiYaht or DarcsYaht, who's gonna win? (Or maybe our dreams of a darcs-based latex-friendly wiki will come true or something)
Hobby-hacking Eric
2006-11-01
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4 comments:
Who looses? Everyone who wants access to the latest version of the tutorial (since there will be two). It seems a bit sad to fork a tutorial...
I don't think there would be a benefit of two versions of the same tutorial, wouldn't it be better to have a LaTeX->Wiki or Wiki->LaTeX tranlator and work on one?
Yeah, true there is a risk to forking :-(
Anonymous: Well, the risk is somewhat mitigated by this being a friendly fork and not a hostile one. Seems like fork danger comes from having the community split into two. In our case yaht-wiki and yaht-darcs are part of the same community. What we could do is consider yaht-darcs to be the "stable" end of yaht and yaht-wiki to be more "unstable".
Ramūnas: I do sort of have a LaTeX->Wiki translator, but the code is so lousy (the bits I wrote anyway) that I'm too self conscious to put it online. It's also very approximative in that there's a bunch of stuff to hand-correct (handling of math mode). Having a good LaTeX->Wiki converter will help me migrate patches from latex to wiki (instead of doing them by hand, but it won't heal the fork, because you can't and don't want to stop people from editing the wiki. A Wiki->LaTeX converter might then look like the right choice. If somebody is willing to build one (hey there is a wiki markup library floating around) that can generate YAHT-friendly LaTeX, that would certainly be much better. But I'm not willing to step up to the plate. Perhaps you would!
The other thing to consider is that it's very likely not a big deal. I don't see myself being inundated with patches to the LaTeX source. Perhaps migrating changes from the wiki will be a bit more time consuming, but it should be ok.
Thanks for your comments! Let's try this out for a couple of months and see what happens...
Just wanted to mention that the darcs YAHT is now purely GFDL. This makes it easier to move content back and forth between it and the wikibook version.
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