[RFC] making release notes a community effort

[Karsten Wade]

On Tue, 2005-04-05 at 20:48 +0200, Kyrre Ness Sjobak wrote:
> tir, 05.04.2005 kl. 19.42 skrev Ignacio Vazquez-Abrams:
> > On Tue, 2005-04-05 at 18:36 +0100, Gavin Henry wrote:
> > > What format would be good for inexperienced users to submit patches/docs in, 
> > > that could be parsed by either Perl or Python, which then pumps out Docbook 
> > > XML?
> > 
> > bbCode! (kidding)
> 
> Doesn't OOo produce some kind of XLM? Isn't that possible to use - at
> least in combination of a *strict* template?

Last time I looked seriously into this about 6 months ago, the project
had been going for over a year and was not in a useful state.  You have
to use the specific OOo template, and it doesn't handle two-way
conversion with DocBook very easily, that is, pulling in DocBook and
outputting DocBook that are functionally the same.  Similarly, you can't
edit a DocBook file directly.

A plain XML editor such as Conglomerate could do the trick.  The point
is to avoid extra unnecessary conversions.

> Or simply collect it by mail, and then have somebody to fix up
> formatting etc. before release?

This is the current method.  Actually, the method that you are supposed
to follow is to submit via bugzilla so a conversation can be had about
the release note.

To do this, developers need to commit to actually submitting release
notes.  At this point, I'd accept small pieces of paper if someone would
actually send them.

At Red Hat, getting developers to think about and contribute to the
release notes was a bit like pulling teeth.  We can't follow this model
in the community.

We'll handle how to structure and write the relnotes on the docs side,
the main point of this thread is to get Fedora developers thinking about
actually submitting release notes to be included.

Documentation, part of a balanced and healthy development diet!

> It might be a good idea to have some kind of tree structure...
> 
> This might be the beginning of something more than just release notes -
> finally some real off-line doc for users to look at! (place a big
> shortcut on their desktops :P )

I'd love to see a docs RPM, even as part of Extras.

It's been pointed out to me that newbies won't read release notes, no
matter what.  Well, maybe if we animate them somehow ... 

For the moment, the release notes audience is people just like ourselves
-- developers and system administrators who need to know nitty-gritty
details about what is new in the release/test.

- Karsten
-- 
Karsten Wade, RHCE * Sr. Tech Writer * http://people.redhat.com/kwade/
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