As you probably know, Debian is in freeze since July. Thus we’re hopefully only a few months away from the release of Debian 7.0 (also known as Wheezy). This means that it’s time to update the Debian Administrator’s Handbook to take into account all the changes and improvements that Wheezy will bring.

The process we’ll use

I have setup a TODO list for Roland and I. Each of us is going to update half of the book. As the work progresses, we will regularly push updated versions of the book here: https://debian-handbook.info/browse/wheezy/

That way you can review the content as it evolves and submit bug reports to further improve the book! Bug reports must be submitted via reportbug debian-handbook just like any other Debian bug report.

I will keep you informed (on this blog) after each significant update (i.e. when a chapter has been fully updated).

Funding the work to update the book

This is also an important milestone for the project. We managed to fund the translation and the liberation of the book with the initial campaign but now we must ensure that sales of printed copies and donations cover for the time we’re going to spend in the next few months to update the book.

And this is indeed a concern because while the volume of sales and donations has been significant during the first 2-3 months after the liberation, it quickly dried up and we’re now down to about 100 EUR of revenues per month for each of Roland and I. This is much less than what we hoped for given the (potential) audience of the book. It’s already not enough to compensate for the time we spend on the book and it’s far from being enough to be able to fund our other free software activities.

This means multiple things:

We must promote the book a bit more, and we need your help. Please share the word about the book, write some reviews on your blog and keep us informed! Please consider donating a few euros to prove that a free book can be financially viable in the long run. Alternatively, you can help one of the translation teams so that the book reaches an even wider audience than today.

Thank you very much for your continued support!

PS: In case you wonder, even though the book is now under a free license, we only got two small contributions besides typo fixes and translations. So it looks like that this book update will only happen if we take care of it ourselves.