[RFC] making release notes a community effort

[Karsten Wade]

On Tue, 2005-04-05 at 14:32 -0500, Tommy Reynolds wrote:
> Uttered Gavin Henry <ghenry at suretecsystems.com>, spake thus:
> 
> > 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?
> > 
> > Either via command line or a cgi/mod_perl/mod_python page?
> 
> There is an XML diff(1)-style program here:
> 
> http://www.logilab.org/projects/xmldiff/
> 
> It's GPL'ed; if needed I could maybe RPM it.

We've been discussing this on-and-off for a bit, because we need an XML
diffing tool for translation.  The translation team uses PO files, and
the current tools they use are line dependent.  Meaning, if we change
anything in the *ML, it issues a need to check for translation, even if
the content itself is no different.

One other twist in all this.  The relnotes HTML is limited in the tags
it can use.  Ed Bailey had a specific set of DocBook tags he used, that
did not include <*list> for example.  IIRC, he would line up <para> sets
like they were bullets.  This is because the HTML parser in Anaconda is
extremely primitive.  There may be another HTML parser in Anaconda's
future, but right now this is our limitation.

To check out an HTML file for how Anaconda would view it, do:

python /usr/lib/anaconda/htmlbuffer.py /path/to/file.html

I asked Jeremy Katz, the Anaconda maintainer, about using plain text.  I
have to do this for the FC4test2 because there is no time for me to
learn the tricks for doing it in DocBook.  AIUI so far, I just don't
create an HTML version and the distro building tools will only copy over
the plain text version.  Anaconda will pick that up.  It mayn't be
pretty, but it'll be present. I'll work this out with release
engineering (AKA Elliott).

As I work with the Wiki on the monolithic release notes, I can say
unequivocally that it is a pain.

Perhaps if we had each section with it's own page.  But then integration
into a single file for /usr/share/doc/fedora-release/ is more of a
challenge.

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