[chuck-dev] Resignation and transition

[Adam Tindale]

Hi All,

I would like to send my official resignation as a core member of the
documentation team. I no longer use ChucK to the extent that I am an
expert and I have not committed to the documentation in at least a
year. I want to see the community flourish, as I see on the list, and
as such I am serving as a gatekeeper to updating and improving the
manual.

Last year we tried a documentation push that had some interesting
developments and I think was ultimately a failure because we did not
push enough traffic there. Their export to PDF was ( and in my opinion
still is) inadequate for generating a manual that can be shipped with
ChucK.

My suggestion moving forward is to move to Markdown or asciidoc for
generating files that can be easily turned into html or pdf with
appropriate style files for each. Github has proved to be an excellent
place for collaborating on these types of projects and I would suggest
that as a place to get the migrating going.

I would be more than happy to help with the migration to a new
platform or to help a new person get up to speed on how I generated
the PDF manual so they can continue to update it with all of the great
discoveries and suggestions on the list. I would also be happy to do
some actual porting work of the documentation to a new system that can
be more easily maintained if that is what is deemed necessary by the
community or new point person.

For history, the original manual was generated by me with help from Ge
and Phil sometime in 2005 or so. I got into ChucK very seriously at
that point and emailed the list or Ge personally to figure out how to
do certain things in the language. For every email Ge sent me I
created a tutorial or reference and compiled it into a document. Ge,
Phil, and I spent many a night generating web references, then I would
port that to LaTeX for the PDF manual. Since that time many other
people have contributed references that have since been included in
the manual and it has grown to the document we know today.

It was a lot of fun and I think it had a significant impact on getting
new users into ChucK. I want to thank the ChucK team and community,
and I look forward to helping you get to the next place.

Adam (--art)