Release Notes Beats

[John J. McDonough]

On Mon, 2010-04-26 at 19:05 -0400, Paul W. Frields wrote:
> On Mon, Apr 26, 2010 at 10:21:09AM -0400, John J. McDonough wrote:
> > For anyone wondering what is going on with the
> > https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Category:Documentation_beats page, I am
> > going through a final review of the notes before making the final POTs.
> > 
> > Beats where I have a yellow background on the Wiki column indicate
> > places where there is content in the XML that isn't on the wiki and
> > needs to be backported.
> > 
> > Note that there have been a lot of changes since Thursday, so the copy
> > at fedorapeople.org is quite out of date.  It should be back tomorrow
> > when the update runs following the POT update. Meanwhile, I've put a
> > copy at
> > 
> > http://jjmcd.fedorapeople.org/Download/Release_Notes/index.html
> > 
> > with the commits to date so if you are interested you don't have to
> > build yourself.
> 
> At some point during each cycle -- and this happened in earlier
> releases of Fedora too, as far back as I can remember -- the wiki
> became less useful as a canonical point of content.  The final
> freezing of the beats and the pressing of POT seems like that point to
> me.
> 
> Might we be better served at this point by simply clearing the beats,
> and referring each page to Bugzilla to file bugs for any remaining
> problems?  I'm not married to the idea, just wanted to put it out
> there for consideration.

For some time it has seemed to me that the beats loose a lot of their
value as we near the end of the cycle.  In the final push to get the
release notes clean, there tends to be a ot of time spent backporting
small fixes to the beats, something that late in the cycle seems to add
little value.

On the other hand, the table of beats does come in handy to track status
and to give folks a clue where there is work left.  That table did draw
some unsolicited help just at the time when it was most needed.

Later on, I think a lot of non-Docs people look to the beats for the
release notes.  Somehow docs.fp.o seems more of a barrier, not sure why.
But people also mark changes in there, and after the document is posted
on docs.fp.o the beats tend to not be monitored as closely.  Perhaps if
each beat was replaced with a page with:

  1) A warning that the beats are no longer being monitored for changes
  2) A note to mark changes in BZ, perhaps with some instructions
  3) A link to the specific file on docs.fp.o containing the content

--McD