Major wiki revisions: release process documentation, package maintenance instructions, repository documentation, Changes...

[Adam Williamson]

Hi, folks. As I hinted a bit, and as some of you might know from IRC,
I've spent the last ~24 hours on something of an epic Wiki revision
spree. I made some fairly major and possibly significant changes, so
under the 'ask forgiveness' principle I thought I'd post a quick summary
here.

* As already mentioned, the "Change Deadlines" are no more. They are now
"Milestone Freezes". See
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Milestone_freezes . (Yeah, I can't decide
on the capitalization). All (I think) significant linking pages have
been updated appropriately. The new page should, I hope, form a useful
and succinct guide to how the milestone freezes actually work.

* https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Fedora_Release_Life_Cycle has been
extensively updated and overhauled to reflect the current Fedora release
process. I have added links to it to quite a lot of pages as I went
along.

* https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Repositories is an entirely new page
which specifically documents the Fedora repositories. Again, I have
added links to this page from several other pages.

* https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Package_update_HOWTO is extensively
overhauled. I ditched the huge, weird tables full of Xs which didn't
appear to convey any useful information at all. Stuff that was about
using the SCM, not actually about doing updates, was removed (see next
line item). The rest of the content has been heavily modified and
updated to reflect current practice and policies and, well, just be
better.

* https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Package_maintenance_guide has been
created from three (and a bit) sources: the package maintenance bits
from the "Package update HOWTO", the "Using Fedora GIT" page which it is
a rename of, and the "Using_git_FAQ_for_package_maintainers" page which
now redirects to it. Having stuff about using the SCM in three different
places, and half of it outdated since Fedora 14, seemed a bad idea. I
believe it subsumes all the still-valid and useful content from all
three sources, and adds some new and updated information. I like the
format for the main guide/walkthrough, with the expandable notes for
each step, but yell if you don't.

* Various pages were adjusted to link or redirect to the above two
pages.

* There's a "Change Wrangler" page now -
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Change_Wrangler - and some things which
used to link to Jaroslav personally now link there (or to
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Fedora_Program_Management , whichever is
appropriate).

* https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/ReleaseEngineering/Overview was
extensively overhauled.

* https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Updates_Policy was adjusted to match
the other changes. Nothing about the actual *policy it sets* was
adjusted (at least not intentionally, please do check for mistakes), but
various names were changed, links were redirected, and so on. Some of
its descriptions of procedures were adjusted to reflect reality,
principally in regards to Bodhi enabling and the early Branched period.

* The old "Feature Freeze Policy" (which had been search-and-replaced to
the "Change Freeze Policy", which caused it to finally cease to bear
*any* resemblance to reality whatsoever) and "Branch Freeze Policy"
pages have been effectively factored out of existence. The "Feature
Freeze" is replaced by the Change "freezes" / checkpoints described at
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/Policy and by the milestone
freezes. The "Branch Freeze" is replaced by the concept of the "Bodhi
enabling point", documented at
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Updates_Policy#Bodhi_enabling (it now
redirects to that page), and invoked in various other places where
appropriate. The changes freeze policy page -
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes_Freeze_Policy - is a kind of
'manual redirect' pointing to the other pages, as it's not clear which
one someone who wound up at it would be looking for.

* https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/Branched was somewhat
overhauled.

* I did a whole ton of smaller stuff as I went through - various pages
got small updates, links were redirected and added (e.g.
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Category:Package_Maintainers has rather
more useful links in "Procedures, Policies and Guides" now), etc etc
etc. You can check my Contributions page -
https://fedoraproject.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Contributions/Adamwill&offset=&limit=500&target=Adamwill - for the whole record, and to check my work.

* I also just did a quick blast through the QA space making some updates
here and there - some light touches to pretty much all the 'primary'
pages, QA, QA/Join, the Test Day and release validation SOPs, etc etc.
Again, check my contribution history for the details.

I hope people find these contributions useful and not the contrary! I'm
hoping the Life Cycle page, the Repositories page, and the updated
Package update HOWTO and Package maintenance guide particularly will be
useful for folks, and the more reality-reflecting Updates Policy page
and the new Milestone freezes page will make the freeze process clearer
to people (which was my motivation coming into this whole thing). It all
just seemed like such a damn mess that burning it down, fixing it, and
asking forgiveness seemed like the best plan :) and of course it's a
wiki, so it's not like anything I changed is lost forever.

Thanks folks!
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | XMPP: adamw AT happyassassin . net
http://www.happyassassin.net