Monday, October 26, 2020

The Meson Manual: Good News, Bad News and Good News

 Starting with good news, the Meson Manual has been updated to a third edition. In addition to the usual set of typo fixes, there is an entirely new chapter on converting projects from an existing build system to Meson. Not only are there tips and tricks on each part of the conversion, there is even guidance on how to get it done on projects that are too big to be converted in one go.

Unfortunately there are also bad news, which boils down to this graph.

This is the monthly sales amounts (in euros) since the beginning of this year. As you can tell it follows a typical exponential decay with a peak at the beginning and then a steady decline. Sales for this month are expected to be noticeably smaller than last month. Unfortunately keeping online sales for a product like this ongoing requires both time and money (to pay for the various services needed). Unfortunately the numbers show that this is not financially worthwhile.

Thus I must inform everyone that the manual will be discontinued. You can still buy it and the download links will stay valid until the end of this year. Thank you to everyone who bought the book and especially to those who sent me feedback and typo fixes.

To end on a positive note, there has been a final price reduction and the manual can now be bought for just €19.95.

FAQ: Will the manual be available under a free license after sales end?

No. At least not in the foreseeable future.

1 comment:

  1. Why not just put it in Gumroad? It's free and their cut is pretty small. You can link directly to the gumroad page, so no need to pay for hosting or a domain. Just make a note that the manual is for (and up to) version X.

    And if you want to make an actual landing page, you could use gitlab's pages with a static site generator to keep the overhead low.

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