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HonKit: A Fork of GitBook

github.com

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Re: HonKit: A Fork of GitBook

#21

Post by prepend »

I’m so happy this project is picking up the fork. Gitbook was a great project, but they really moved everything to their SaaS with artificial barriers to just using the software.

It was cool that they left cli around, but as abandonware.

I thought it strange that it was such a non open source behavior to only support their monthly service even though one of the main benefits I see in static site generators is the flexibility of hosting and cost.

I feel bad for them as it must be a hard business to compete with Bookdown and other projects.

Re: HonKit: A Fork of GitBook

#24

Post by jankotek »

axegon_ wrote: post #11

Never used gitbook so I have the following question: in terms of content creation, how does it stack up compared to sphinx?

I had many problems with sphinx, mainly site structure, gitbook was easier. But that was 5 years ago. Now I am switching to github wiki.

Re: HonKit: A Fork of GitBook

#25

Post by thrwaway69 »

chillfox wrote: post #12
creato wrote: post #9

I just spent a few minutes reading the readme, and I still can't figure out why this tool (or GitBook) is directly connected to git. OK, a bunch of markdown and json files in folders form a book. How is this connected to git? I totally get storing the markdown files/folders in git, but surely any other version control system would be fine too?

Git has been a trendy word for a while, a bit like sticking "i" in front of your product name.

I don't understand why. People don't like master branch but they don't care about git which is literally a slang for an old senile idiot.

Re: HonKit: A Fork of GitBook

#26

Post by sovietmudkipz »

JimDabell wrote: post #8

For those who weren’t aware, this is the reason behind the fork: > As the efforts of the GitBook team are focused on the GitBook.com platform, the CLI is no longer under active development. — https://github.com/GitbookIO/gitbook#%EF%B8%8F-deprecation-w...

I get sad about this. This project moved from an open source model to a closed source one. I have nothing but sympathy for the team for doing this but I do wonder if there is an alternative way of monetizing and keeping the project open source.

Seriously- what are the monetization strategies for open source projects? I know red hat, hashicorp and others sell a enterprise support and hosting solution as enterprise add ons to their open source projects. Wordpress seems like a great community built around building widgets for non technical folks, but have the source code available for programmers to extend and modify.

Is it possible for one to sell software and have it open source?

Re: HonKit: A Fork of GitBook

#29

Post by glofish »

I wrote a sizeable book with gitbook and I found it to have substantial design flaws. Once the book had a few hundred files the rendering became exceedingly slow.

It became clear to me that, internally some sort of scaling problem is present in the code that manifests itself abruptly once the book hits a certain size.

Rendering to html would take 2-3 minutes (attempting to reload the latest version of a single page also triggers a complete re-rendering of all pages, obviously making the process non-feasible).

I migrated to bookdown that renders the entire book in about 10 seconds (and reloads single pages quickly).

I wonder if honkit fixed those internal design errors that made gitbook unusuable for me.

Re: HonKit: A Fork of GitBook

#30

Post by type0 »

So nice to see that gitbook-cli abandoned project is finally picked up again. How would the integration with Calibre work, since it awaits major changes in upcoming versions?
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