[RFC] making release notes a community effort

[Paul W. Frields]

Just a couple observations...

On Thu, 2005-04-07 at 19:28 +0200, Ronny Buchmann wrote:
[...snip...]
> > I have serious reservations about having the Wiki be canonical for the
> > release notes.  It seems to be *much* easier to author in DocBook and
> > paste a plain text output into a Wiki page each test and release.
> DocBook is not bad, but typing tags is a pain (learning hundreds of keystrokes 
> or clicking isn't better).

Which is why the Emacs psgml mode is helpful.  There are plenty of other
Emacs packages, that's just what I use.  Only a few keystrokes to
remember, and you don't have to remember *any* tags since you can get a
list at any time, which is true for many of the other packages.  I've
found the tagging to be easy enough that I use DocBook for non-FDP stuff
(like real, paying work!) nowadays.

[...snip...]
> > This project is regularly criticized for not taking advantage of the
> > ease of publishing with Wikis.  I am willing to review that policy, but
> > we have to keep in mind the fact that quality rules over quantity.
> > There are plenty of bad and just-good-enough Linux docs out there.  Ours
> > are and will be better.  This is because of the quality of our content,
> > tools, and writing processes.
> I don't think the quality of the content is related to the tools.

Correct, but that's not what Karsten said.  He said that the three
factors of (1) content, (2) tools, and (3) writing processes {will,}
make our docs better.  Many of the tutorials you can find on the Web at
large are poorly marked, narrated, and organized.  It makes following
them difficult for people who speak the same language as the writer,
much less for non-native speakers.  Our content, tools, and processes
are designed to make reading, understanding, contribution, editing, and
translation as easy as possible.

-- 
Paul W. Frields, RHCE                          http://paul.frields.org/
  gpg fingerprint: 3DA6 A0AC 6D58 FEC4 0233  5906 ACDB C937 BD11 3717
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