Re: Announcing Pro Git Second Edition Reedited

From: Jon Forrest <nobozo@gmail.com>
Date: Dec 11, 2018, 14:39 UTC
Message-ID: <a1941151-9453-5830-7175-7c8e27425274@gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <20181211105007.GD7233@sigill.intra.peff.net>

On 12/11/2018 2:50 AM, Jeff King wrote:

Show 7 quoted lines

> The content at https://git-scm.com/book is pulled regularly from
> https://github.com/progit/progit2, which has collected a number of fixes
> (as well as translations) since the 2nd edition was released.
> 
> Have you considered sending some of your edits there? It sounds like
> they may be too large to just dump as a big PR, but it might be possible
> to grow together over time.

Fair question. I had tried doing this for the first edition of Pro Git, but the person who was in charge of accepting changes wasn't a native speaker of English. As a result I had a hard time convincing him that my changes were necessary. Many of my changes were very subjective, and not technical, so this was hard to overcome. Things might have been different if I were correcting technical errors or adding significant sections to the book. But, since I'm not a Git expert, that's not what I was attempting to do.

Things have changed for the better for the second edition of Pro Git. Its management seems much more willing to accept the kind of changes I make, as shown by their reaction to the excellent work by Robert Day. Even so, given the amount of changes I've made, it's unlikely that my changes would be accepted.

I do track the changes to the second edition of Pro Git and incorporate that ones that still apply into my version.

But I hear what you're saying. Maybe if and when the third edition of Pro Git comes out I'll try what you suggest.

Cordially, Jon Forrest