Release Notes Beats

[Paul W. Frields]

On Tue, Apr 27, 2010 at 11:46:34AM -0400, John J. McDonough wrote:
> 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 at fedorapeople.org is quite out of date.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

I think this is correct, and I'd add:

0) Clear out all content in the beat to clarify that the wiki is no
   longer our source for content for that release

And make the BZ note include a link with the right stuff filled in
already for the user.

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