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The Wayland Book Is Now Freely Available

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  • #31
    Originally posted by frank007 View Post

    In fact, there is no reasons that someone else write this book. The wayland's developers should write it.
    The problem is, not all developers like to write documentation. And not all developers are good with the kinds of writing and articulation that makes for good documentation.

    Having followed Sway, and Drew's work for some time, though not in super detail, I do get a sense that he is passionate about Wayland. If he is willing and able to document things in a way that makes it easier for others to grasp some finer details of how it works, I don't see any problem with that.

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    • #32
      Originally posted by ehansin View Post

      The problem is, not all developers like to write documentation. And not all developers are good with the kinds of writing and articulation that makes for good documentation.

      Having followed Sway, and Drew's work for some time, though not in super detail, I do get a sense that he is passionate about Wayland. If he is willing and able to document things in a way that makes it easier for others to grasp some finer details of how it works, I don't see any problem with that.
      Yes, but if Drew makes some mistakes, he can say: sorry, I'm not the author. So, I think a wayland developer (as Drew) have to guess many things. This is not the correct way to do things.

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      • #33
        I am the author of this book. I think it is very silly to doubt that I lack the qualifications to write it, I am one of maybe a dozen people worldwide with comparible levels of experience with Wayland. If you find any errors, tell me about them, and I will correct them.

        As for whether or not it "has any value" or I made it free because "I realized it won't make any money":

        Code:
        # select date_trunc('month', created) mo, count(*) from purchases where price > 0 group by mo order by mo desc;
        mo | count
        ---------------------+-------
        2020-05-01 00:00:00 | 3
        2020-04-01 00:00:00 | 26
        2020-03-01 00:00:00 | 29
        2020-02-01 00:00:00 | 20
        2020-01-01 00:00:00 | 30
        2019-12-01 00:00:00 | 25
        2019-11-01 00:00:00 | 19
        2019-10-01 00:00:00 | 47
        2019-09-01 00:00:00 | 75
        (9 rows)
        # select sum(price) / 100 from purchases;
        ?column?
        ----------
        2590
        (1 row)
        Thanks for sharing the link to my book, Michael.

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        • #34
          Originally posted by frank007 View Post

          Yes, but if Drew makes some mistakes, he can say: sorry, I'm not the author. So, I think a wayland developer (as Drew) have to guess many things. This is not the correct way to do things.
          Isn't this the case with almost every single book or online resource related to foss and programming in general though?
          Unless it's the official documentation of the project ofc, in which case it's probably branded as such and doesn't even aim to be user-friendly, but rather technical and merely focused around the spec itself.

          There's hardly any example of a similar project officially producing guidelines and coding practises that would make any sense to an outsider.
          It's always some knowledgeable third party trying to pass down some of their expertise to others.

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          • #35
            Originally posted by ddevault View Post
            I am the author of this book. I think it is very silly to doubt that I lack the qualifications to write it, I am one of maybe a dozen people worldwide with comparible levels of experience with Wayland. If you find any errors, tell me about them, and I will correct them.
            Hi Drew. Thanks for your work on Sway, and the greater Wayland ecosystem. I currently have a dual-boot setup with (gasp!) Windows on one, and Fedora 32 + Sway on the other. I was running Arch + Sway, but I wanted my Linux boot to be more aligned with servers I sometimes work with, which are RHEL and CentOS based. In either case, I wanted the Linux boot to be more about terminal work, including development. I'm not a classically trained developer, but I like to think I might be able to play a half-a**** one on TV some day! Mostly web based stuff interacting with databases and the odd logic layer here and there.

            Btw, I'm excited about what people might come up with in the "lightweight shell" space with Wayland, leveraging things like your wrlroots, etc. I like Sway, but I also think we will see some other cool things. Thanks again for all your work on this stuff.
            Last edited by ehansin; 05 May 2020, 04:55 PM.

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            • #36
              Originally posted by ddevault View Post
              I am the author of this book. I think it is very silly to doubt that I lack the qualifications to write it, I am one of maybe a dozen people worldwide with comparible levels of experience with Wayland.
              That may be, but around here we are one of the dozen or so Internet wise guys that hold the truth about anything and everything :P

              Sarcasm aside, as a fellow programmer, I always appreciate quality documentation. In any form I can get it.

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              • #37
                Originally posted by bug77 View Post
                That may be, but around here we are one of the dozen or so Internet wise guys that hold the truth about anything and everything :P
                We sure do know it all around here, don't we Biggest collection of know it all's this side of a Cisco CRS-1 backbone router!!

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                • #38
                  Originally posted by ddevault View Post
                  I am the author of this book.

                  Thanks for sharing the link to my book, Michael.
                  Thank you very much for your great contributions! I am very happy to read that your book found its audience and made you some money.
                  I already enjoyed reading your blog articles about wayland and I am for sure going to enjoy reading the book!

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                  • #39
                    Originally posted by miabrahams View Post
                    Drew DeVault is a powerhouse. The Linux desktop community is lucky to have him.
                    He reminds me of Linus in many ways, we are lucky to have them.

                    ddevault: Thanks for access to the book and the hard work on the projects and welcome to Phoronix.

                    Comment


                    • #40
                      For those that want a pdf or whatever today, just clone the read-only repo, go to /src, you'll see a bunch of md files. Those are markdown, so use your favorite converter to generate epub or pdf. For pdf, I would use
                      Code:
                       pandoc $Chapters -t latex -s -o Wayland_book.pdf
                      , where $Chapters is the .md file list in the order you want. The -t latex will give you a really nice typography Yes some .md files are in subfolders and the order of the md files is not alphanumeric, but if you want the book as pdf or epub you can definitely generate that list inside 20 mins. Yeah, it's painful to have to do such task, but so is documenting anything. If the first one to do it shares that list then the job is halfway done.

                      I didn't double check, but I think the first level list is
                      Code:
                      Chapters="introduction.md SUMMARY.md acknowledgements.md protocol-design.md libwayland.md wayland-display.md registry.md surfaces.md xdg-shell-basics.md surfaces-in-depth.md seat.md xdg-shell-in-depth.md clipboard.md protocol-extensions.md"
                      What's missing is all the stuff in the subfolders which will have to be placed in the right sub-sections. I gave up because I don't want the book myself, I was just irritated by the complainers.

                      Originally posted by ddevault View Post
                      I am the author of this book. I think it is very silly to doubt that I lack the qualifications to write it, I am one of maybe a dozen people worldwide with comparible levels of experience with Wayland. If you find any errors, tell me about them, and I will correct them.

                      As for whether or not it "has any value"

                      Thanks for sharing the link to my book, Michael.
                      Thank you for writing this book. So many project have no documentation or it's a bunch of copy/paste from freenode chats between devs. Incredible that people have the audacity to complain about this, but hey, welcome to the internet where everyone's a critic.

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