Subject: Re: Git Community Book

From: Junio C Hamano <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 29 Jul 2008 11:42:30 -0700

"Scott Chacon" <[email-masked]> writes:

>>
>> There is no license in the source code - what are the copying terms?
>>
>
> I copied in the COPYING file from Git - GPL2.
>
>> It is maybe somewhat unfortunate that this is in a different format that
>> the standard git choice asciidoc, but the formats do look rather similar
>> so I assume it should not be hard to even convert from one to another if
>> needed.
>
> I simply didn't want to get asciidoc working locally - it's always
> been a bit of a pain to compile (I've heard it referred to more than
> once as the only 'nightmare dependancy' in git), and I don't need to
> make man pages or anything, so it seemed Markdown would be a better
> choice for my output targets.  There are a number of good Markdown
> interpreters and they're easy to get running.

I personally like markdown, but doesn't your refusal to work with existing
practices pose a significant problem, unless:

 (0) you do not consider it a goal to keep the documentation shipped with
     git and your book in sync; or

 (1) you have either markdown to asciidoc (or the other way around)
     converter; the book is written in markdown, and its conversion back
     to asciidoc is fed to Documentation as patches (or the other way
     around); or

 (2) somebody tries to find markdown to manpage, and we convert
     Documentation/ to markdown.

Or is this, "fork once and borrow reviewer's time, but never be able to
contribute back to the original text because the result is so different"
approach?