Thursday, October 25, 2012

Open Writing of Serval Documentation

As the Serval Project is based in a University, we have a need to write academic papers.  However, such papers take a while to write, get peer reviewed and published. This is a problem since Serval is also an open-source project, and we need to get information out to the community in a timely manner.

So I am trying an experiment.  I am progressively moving all paper preparation activity into our github repository (http://github.com/servalproject/serval-docs/).

Some legacy documents will be in LibreOffice /OpenOffice format.

For new documents I will be aiming to use LyX (a LaTeX frontend), because commits that change documents will result in meaningful diffs between versions.  Also figures exist as separate files, and so are easier for people to access, update and/or reuse.

One of the nice advantages is that people can submit corrections, view older revisions, or submit "bugs" or "feature enhancements" for improvements to the document.  Overall, it seems like it should result in better papers.

Anyway, the first document there is a document describing Serval Rhizome.

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