On Sun, 2011-09-11 at 11:45 -0400, Eric H. Christensen wrote:
Twice a year the Fedora Docs team runs around with their hair on fire
trying to get the Release Notes bits put together, translated, and packaged. The
packaging requirement puts a lot of strain on the process, though, as thousands of lines
of code go into the documentation, they are all new every release, and most of the time
are only available at the last minute based on changes to code in other programs.
I would point out, however, that packaging is nowhere near the amount of
effort it takes to get them on docs.fp.o. The major burden is getting a
few folks to give them karma. Pushing to docs.fp.o, on the other hand,
takes huge amounts of bandwidth since you need to clone all of the
documents for all of the releases since forever, work a bit of mumbo
jumbo, and then push the mess. Thank heavens for git!
I wouldn't object to skipping the packaging, but the way things have
been automated and systemetized, the effort breakdown is probably
something like:
Capturing the content 90%
Conversion to xml 5%
packaging 1%
docs.fp.o 4%
Yes, pushing to the web is almost as burdensome as the XML conversion,
maybe even more so (although with the demise of python-mwlib that may
change a lot). Last time I was away and Zack packaged them; he was
surprised at how painless it was.
--McD
To reduce the strain on the process I'd like to propose that the Release Notes not be
packaged (in RPM) and included in the releases and only be made available on the Fedora
Docs website.
Comments, questions, remarks?
--Eric