Removing the Fedora Release Notes from the releases.

[Eric H. Christensen]

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On Mon, Sep 12, 2011 at 01:23:56PM -0400, John J. McDonough wrote:
> On Sun, 2011-09-11 at 11:45 -0400, Eric H. Christensen wrote:
> > Twice a year the Fedora Docs team runs around with their hair on fire trying to get the Release Notes bits put together, translated, and packaged.  The packaging requirement puts a lot of strain on the process, though, as thousands of lines of code go into the documentation, they are all new every release, and most of the time are only available at the last minute based on changes to code in other programs.
> 
> I would point out, however, that packaging is nowhere near the amount of
> effort it takes to get them on docs.fp.o.  The major burden is getting a
> few folks to give them karma.  Pushing to docs.fp.o, on the other hand,
> takes huge amounts of bandwidth since you need to clone all of the
> documents for all of the releases since forever, work a bit of mumbo
> jumbo, and then push the mess.  Thank heavens for git!

Well, cloning would take place no matter what.  Git has been great.

> 
> I wouldn't object to skipping the packaging, but the way things have
> been automated and systemetized, the effort breakdown is probably
> something like:
> 
> Capturing the content 90%
> Conversion to xml 5%
> packaging 1%
> docs.fp.o 4%

I think we can get the tools to do most of the docs.fp.o work for us.  The biggest problem with the packaging, as I and others understand it, is that the tool chain isn't well known, the package itself is quite large and, and the schedule makes packaging less flexible.

> 
> Yes, pushing to the web is almost as burdensome as the XML conversion,
> maybe even more so (although with the demise of python-mwlib that may
> change a lot).  Last time I was away and Zack packaged them; he was
> surprised at how painless it was.

Zach said it took him quite a bit longer to do the work that usually do.  

Release Engineering has already removed the requirement for the Release Notes in the releases.  My proposal is simply we would be better to use the extra time we would have to keep the Release Notes up to date and reduce the amount of bits that people have to download when we push updates.

Just to be clear, I'm not saying that we shouldn't do this, but more over trying to get the option to do this.

- --Eric

> --McD
> 
> > 
> > To reduce the strain on the process I'd like to propose that the Release Notes not be packaged (in RPM) and included in the releases and only be made available on the Fedora Docs website.
> > 
> > Comments, questions, remarks?
> > 
> > --Eric
> 
> 
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