Some thoughts on beat writing

[Karsten Wade]

Mcd -- are you by chance coming to FUDCon in January?  Working out a
new process and some tools to go with it for F11 beat writing would
make a great hackfest.  It's also a chance to teach the sub-projects
how to support their beat(s).

More below ...

On Wed, Nov 26, 2008 at 07:56:45PM -0500, John J. McDonough wrote:
>
> ----- Original Message ----- From: "Paul W. Frields" 
> <stickster at gmail.com>
> To: <fedora-docs-list at redhat.com>
> Sent: Wednesday, November 26, 2008 7:19 PM
> Subject: Re: Some thoughts on beat writing
>
>> I think there is a better way -- feeding package information
>> to beats is simply not a good one.  We had to change a lot
>> of the Amateur Radio beat for that very reason.  Simply
>> listing the results of 'yum info' or 'yum search', or producing
>> a listing of changed version numbers, and calling that release
>> notes devalues the process a bit.
>
> Oh absolutely.  The yum info stuff merely gives the beat writer some view 
> into what's there.  Once he recognizes the version change, the beat 
> writer would then go to the project website (also listed in the yum 
> info), review the upstream's release notes (where available), make a 
> judgement as to whether they really needed comment, and then devise the 
> release notes entry.
>
> I do think that the yum info is a good start for the "what's there" page  
> that the release notes might point to.  I do think the beat writer 
> should, however, be encouraged to embellish the yum description.  But at 
> least it is a start.  A nice summary should go into the release notes 
> preceding the changes, but it should be very brief, perhaps one or two 
> sentences.

So, yes, there is a novel idea here -- a permanent beat page on the
wiki that has:

* Commands to use to get more info about packages (yum info, rpm -q
  --changelog)

* List of packages for that section

* Programmatically generated changes between FN and FN-1

This is similar to the long requested, sometimes provided, and always
dubious "list of packages changed for this release."  When we do this,
it is always a long, long list on a wiki page; it doesn't belong in
the notes themselves; it is slightly useful but only so much so.

- Karsten
-- 
Karsten 'quaid' Wade, Community Gardener
http://quaid.fedorapeople.org
AD0E0C41
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