Proposal to Enhance Bevy Learning Resources and Collaboration: Please update to Bevy .12 and merge it to the parent project. about bevy-cheatbook HOT 1 CLOSED

Thank you for the compliments.

You think I haven't extensively thought about all of this before?

I am aware of all of this. It is just not an easy task.

If I could "just update everything to the latest release", I would have done it ages ago. You think I don't want to update the book?

It takes a lot of work for a book of this size, literally over a week of full-time work. I don't have the time or mental energy to do that all at once, so I am doing it gradually. A decent portion of the book is up to date with 0.12. Many pages are not, and the ones still stuck on 0.9 are, unfortunately, the hardest and most time-consuming to update.

I spent the two weeks leading up to the Bevy 0.12 release working on Cheatbook for a few hours every day. As you can see, I only managed to update about half the content.

That is exactly why the book has the per-page versioning policy. Before (up until Bevy 0.9), I used to think I could keep the whole book up to date, but I burned out. That's why the book is stuck on 0.9 for so long. So now, the Bevy version for each page is clearly stated at the top of the page, as to avoid misleading readers, while letting me work through everything at my own pace, as I can manage it.

As for making things official, again, it is not an easy thing.

"Official" is not just a matter of putting the content upstream.

It means working with the project and its organizational structure. I would not have been able to write this book at all, if every time I had to make any change, I'd have to go through Bevy's PR review process. The overhead would have actually made it impossible to write a book like Bevy Cheatbook.

Believe me, I know that, in an ideal world, having it official would be a good thing. It would give me amazing personal reputation in the community and it would make the book discoverable and allow the community to participate.

But it requires the Bevy Project to have an organizational structure and policies that allow me to do my work and don't get in the way to the point of making it impossible.

It also requires a lot of interpersonal trust. When the book is unofficial, its quality only affects my reputation. When it is official, it affects the reputation of the whole project, and Cart (+ the other maintainers) would probably want to have control/influence over the editorial direction and content of the book. Or they would have to trust me so much that they put me in charge of the "official documentation" for the project. None of this is easy.

The reason why Cheatbook is unofficial is because I needed the freedom and flexibility to work autonomously, if I were to be able to do it at all.

Bevy has actually had several attempts to make a more comprehensive official book, including some amazing work by Alice, one of Bevy's maintainers. But, as you can see, those efforts went nowhere. Alice's book is stuck in draft form, in some PRs/branches/RFCs. It is not on the website, and you are not reading it, you are reading Cheatbook instead. This is proof that I am right to keep Cheatbook unofficial. At least until the Bevy organization can figure out a strategy to make it viable to write and maintain an official book.

I have had discussions with Bevy maintainers about this topic. We are trying to come up with a plan to improve Bevy's documentation and organizational practices.

Believe me, our goals are aligned. I also want the best for the community.

from bevy-cheatbook.