Community Websites was (Re: Fedora News Updates #2)

[Jef Spaleta]

André Kelpe wrote:
  I really like what you are doing, but would it be possible to have   a
RSS-feed for the update-page like redhat had for 7.3-9?

Warren Togami wrote in reply:
  Regarding those Fedora updates page, the latest kernel wasn't a
  security update, only bugfix. I think.

I think long term, the best thing we can do about notice text for
updates, is to create them natively in some xml format. So that the xml
formated notice file can be reparsed as needed, to produce the
fedora-annouce-list emails, and to be used as an rss feed that ALL
community communication sites can pick up and use, and I hope that 
even the repository/mirrors can be able to reparse the notice xml 
and store that information somehow, so update clients can optionally get
access to that notice information and present it to the user.  I plan to
poke people in the eye about this idea in as many relevant forums as I
can...this weekend.

Right now, as different community sites spring up to try to fill the
community information void there's going to be a lot of duplication of
effort on several fronts:
*News summarizing
*Blog organization and other attempts to pull 'current' 
  information from developers
*FAQ writing
*Tutorial/Howto writing
*Update notice republishing

Now some duplication of effort can't really be avoided because its based
on stylistic differences or valid attempts to use different technology
and there is a sense of evolutionary competition on the ideas at issue.
Some duplication however, is just wasteful and I hope as more community
sites emerge and evolve we can find a way to reduce wasteful
duplication. One example is the update notice republishing. Like I said,
i think there is a clear case to streamline update notice text
generation as part of the build process so that its much easier to use
in a number of different communication avenues. But this example is more
of an upstream process issue than an issue the community sites can
really push on themselves.

Another example, that I think the community sites are going to have to
agree to push hard to work on together...is FAQ/HOWTO/Tutorial
duplication. I think is going to be a really big problem that is going
to fracture the community sites in a way that is ultimately not useful
to the community at large. I would encourage ALL fedora community
news/opinion/help sites to ACTIVELY participate with the official Fedora
documentation subproject on the issue of Howto/Tutorial writing. I don't
have a problem with different community sites having different versions
of howtos covering the same topic in the short term. But I feel there
MUST be a recognition that in the long term, to work towards getting
howtos and tutorials on a topic synced up and in a state useful for the
official docs project. To quote http://fedora.redhat.com/projects/docs/:

"The goal of the Docs Project is to create easy-to-follow, task-based
documentation for Fedora Core users and developers. Other than the
Installation Guide, each document is in article format, with one article
per topic. This way, writers can contribute documentation about a
specific topic without having to worry about how it fits into a manual
or how it flows with other topics. Since the docs are for the Fedora
Project;, they only need to describe how to perform tasks on Fedora
Core."

If the howtos and tutorials on the community sites aren't flowing back
upstream to the Fedora docs subproject...this is extremely wasteful, and
limiting in terms of getting high quality tasks based documentation into
the distribution.  

-jef