On 2013-02-11, Greg Newby wrote:
Feel free to spin up a separate effort, of course. However, I am still optimistic about the feasibility of the approach I outlined a year or so ago (?) of having a user-contributed area, with something like a TRAC for variations.
Unfortunately, you would need Marcello on board to make any progress. Marcello's thing of RST everywhere to be processed by his software against his stylesheets is pretty much the exact opposite of what you suggested. Therefore no progress on this line can occur, as has been demonstrated over the past year.
Making this scalable is challenging. Doing it so that minimal changes are needed to the existing PG structure is key. (And, especially, so I can't be a bottleneck in the process. I hate that.)
PG as it stands is a scalability disaster zone. The same five people in charge of maintaining 40000 books who were in charge of maintaning 5000 books soon to be in charge of maintaining 50000 books. Really? 100 errata reports a month to process, with only one person in the least bit interested in looking at them, thus an ever increasing backlog that will never see the light of day, thus errata reporters quickly realising that it is not worth the effort. What happens when one of those five can no longer stand it and steps down? Is there anyone who would be fool enough to join their ranks? What happens if you (Greg) get hit by a bus? The only scalable solution is a curated multi library approach, in particular with DP maintaining its own library and DP's PPers taking responsibility for errata in the work they produce. Hell, DP has all but got a functioning errata system ready to go, and the likes of Jeroan have set ups that would make processing errata as simple as could be. But that will happen over Marcello's cold, dead body, and you can't afford to lose Marcello either. But now I'm falling into the old gutvol-d trap of proclaiming the problems without proposing viable solutions. I don't have a solution that stands a chance of being implemented, so I am instead looking towards a solution that may result in me personally having access to some decent ebooks. It may be that that solution ends up being useful to PG in the future, it may not. PG will certainly benefit in the meantime because buried reworks are a damn good place to store data. Regards Jon