Fedora 12 Beta Announcement

[Paul W. Frields]

On Mon, Oct 19, 2009 at 10:39:28AM -0700, Adam Williamson wrote:
> On Fri, 2009-10-16 at 08:15 -0400, John J. McDonough wrote:
> > ----- Original Message ----- 
> > From: "Adam Williamson" <awilliam at redhat.com>
> > To: <sundaram at fedoraproject.org>; "For participants of the Documentation 
> > Project" <fedora-docs-list at redhat.com>
> > Cc: "John J. McDonough" <wb8rcr at arrl.net>
> > Sent: Friday, October 16, 2009 4:43 AM
> > Subject: Re: Fedora 12 Beta Announcement
> > 
> > 
> > > Rahul and I bashed it around some more today, thanks to Rahul for
> > > dragging me in, I should have been reading the list to keep up with
> > > this.
> > 
> > You gotta love it when everyone gets in on the party.  Thanks!
> 
> I see more changes keep landing :)
> 
> Couple of notes on recent changes:
> 
> "Of note, is that by default, Dracut generates generic initramfs images
> containing most kernel modules needed to boot on most hardware,
> increasing file size by about 3 times. To switch to more efficient
> hostonly images, see /etc/dracut.conf." - I don't think this kind of
> release note belongs in the beta announcement (if we take this one, I
> can contribute all kinds of similar ones to the other sections). At
> most, a straight link to the release notes (where this text should
> actually be included).

Agreed.

> "As always, the Fedora Project continues to push these enhancements
> upstream and make them available for all Linux distributions." - it
> seems a bit odd to write this _just_ in the webcam section, when
> obviously it applies to almost the entire document. Either we should
> have a little general blurb about this at the top - something like 'The
> Fedora Project's policy is to contribute all its development work to
> upstream projects to benefit as many users of all distributions and
> operating systems as possible', perhaps with a link elsewhere in the
> Wiki to the full policy and 'list of contributions' page - or we don't
> mention it at all.

Agreed again, and I would simply leave this out.  This is a beta
announcement and not a policy statement.

> Developers and Sysadmins proposed section - I'm worried the
> announcement's already pretty long. In my experience, people tune out
> after the first half a page or so. (Most people probably aren't going to
> read past 'graphics support improvements' in the current text, IMHO).
> Still, not sure what a good solution is. A separate page would be
> equally rarely-viewed and it's hard to send out an announcement as
> multiple pages. I've been trying to keep the length of the current text
> down but it just keeps ballooning...

I made a few corrections but likely much has changed since then, and I
withheld my knife/machete/axe at the time.  We have consistently faced
a problem of what should be simple texts growing out of proportion to
their readership's attention span.

My advice: Cut mercilessly!  

-- 
Paul W. Frields                                http://paul.frields.org/
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