A few weeks ago I started on a project to gather all information needed by the Bugsquad Team and put everything in a nice PDF. I have posted on the Bugsquad’s mailing list the reasons why I wanted to write this book. The basic idea is to have a single well structured document so you don’t get confused trying to read 5 wiki pages at the same time.

Unfortunately, I don’t have much time to work on this book now, as I have tons of Web development to do. The Open Office document was staying here untouched and unfinished in my Documents directory and I thought this was too bad. This is all about mutual help and open contributions so I’m not going to let this idea rot on my computer.

The current document is already almost 100 pages long, but there is still some work to do :

• Convert the book in a Version Control System friendly format. It can be Latex (like the Ubuntu Manual), markdown, SGML, Docbook or any other format that can easily be exported to PDF. The current Open Office format is inappropriate to work on with multiple contributors.
• Add a Tools chapter which is a copy of the Tools section in Bugquad’s Knowledge base
• Give a better structure to the document, there should be as little forward references as possible and the reader should be able to stop reading the book at any point and still have valuable knowledge. (Check this out). David Tombs made a very good remark on the mailing list , but I do not want this Handbook to be a stripped down version of the Wiki, I should be useful for both beginners and experienced team members. A ‘lite version’ of the Bugsquad Handbook could easily be made by taking only the first 30 pages or so from the complete book.
• This project requires many eyeballs to stay fresh and up-to-date. If you want to be involved, you should subscribe to the mailing list and to some Wiki pages so you get notified when they change.
• Be awesome and bring your own ideas !

Download the current version of the Bugsquad Handbook : bugsquad-handbook.odt.tar.gz

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This entry was posted on Sunday, April 11th, 2010 at 14:57 and is filed under Ubuntu. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.