Self-Introduction

[John J. McDonough]

On Sun, 2010-08-01 at 01:20 +0900, Юрий Хабаров wrote:
> John,
> 
> Thank you for your answer.
> 
> If it won't impede you, can you describe me, who are "Beat Writers",
> please ?
> 
> Yuri Khabarov.

Yuri

Good question.  I think we have a page somewhere describing it, and I
think it is probably badly out of date! One of the things I need to do
is to figure out what we have and make it useful.

Basically, the idea of a beat writer is kind of taken from the
newspapers.  A beat writer selects a particular area of interest and
then develops an understanding of what is happening in that area for the
upcoming release.

The starting point is the "Feature Pages".  However, these only cover
the truly major features.  Fedora now has over 15,000 packages and for
any release a significant portion of those get updated.  Part of what
the beat writer should do is to look at upcoming changes in those
packages and explore whether the change needs to be documented.

In recent releases, we try to only document "significant" changes in the
Release Notes.  But it takes someone with some feeling for the
particular area to see what is significant, especially from a user
perspective.  What isn't significant to a developer might be very
significant to a user.

The various beats are each quite different.  The database beat, for
example, consists almost entirely of MySQL, Postgres and SQLite and
their associated support packages.  The development tools beat, on the
other hand, has hundreds of packages.

So the beat writer might explore the upstream release notes, perhaps
talk with developers or maintainers, and decide that a particular
changes requires something in the Release Notes.  He then drafts
something on the wiki.  Depending on the change, he might ask a
maintainer to review his draft to be sure he didn't mis-state
something. 

As we get close to Beta we will clean up and perhaps triage what is on
the wiki, then convert it do DocBook/Publican for release.  We try to
get most of it in beta so that folks can submit bug reports against any
issues in the Release Notes prior to final release.

We will also try to get as much translation done as possible for Beta,
although the real thing is for final release.  Between beta and final
release we will try to minimize unnecessary changes so there isn't a lot
of material that needs to be re-translated.

Translation is done by the L10N team, and we try to work closely with
them, managing changes and providing them with nightly builds of the
entire document in all the languages as the translation progresses.

So, that's kind of it in a summary.  I suspect I wasn't concise enough
with some things, probably glossed over others, but that is the way the
Beat Writers contribute to the Release Notes.

The current beats, along with the names of folks who have spoken up for
them, are at https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Documentation_Beats

Hope that helps

--McD