Fedora 7 Test 1 and release notes

[Karsten Wade]

On Thu, 2007-02-08 at 12:38 +0530, Rahul Sundaram wrote:
> Hi
> 
> Some strong notes here:
> 
> http://distrowatch.com/weekly.php?issue=20070205#news
> 
> A followup comment #72 by the author (CC'ed) reveals that the primary 
> concern is over lack of release notes.
> 
> http://distrowatch.com/weekly.php?issue=20070205&mode=16#comments

Naturally distrowatch.com knows this better than I do, but I don't
recall doing fresh relnotes for test1 ... ever.  Maybe we did when RHL
had Ed Bailey on relnotes full time, but not since he vacated that post.

> Of course with our level of resources doing full fledged releases notes 
> and translation for a test 1 release of a fast moving distribution like 
> Fedora is not easily done. 

More so, we are relying upon the developers to give us more meaning, and
the timing is quite tight.

> I was traveling to FUDCon Boston 2007 
> finalized and unfortunately didnt have any time to work on the release 
> notes but this shouldnt be resting on me entirely. 

Good lord, no.  In fact, I'd like you to turn at least 50% of your
attention that you normally give the relnotes into pressure on
developers to do their own dirty work.

I've raised this with the Fedora Project Board.  Complaining about
developer documentation participation is a seasonal sport, but in the
case of Fedora, they have zero excuses.  We have truly made documenting
the OS fundamentally simple.

> However a single page 
> overview or some notes within the announcements itself wouldnt take much 
> time.

Or just a link to http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Docs/Beats with some
associate old-content clean out.  Some of that content is in fact
already updated.

This comes down to a lack of complete tools.  If we had the "Output to
Release Notes Package" functionality, it would be easy.  As it is, we
are still manually converting.  I am working on getting this
resolved[1], but in the meantime ...

[1] http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-infrastructure-list/2007-February/msg00008.html

> It would also be good to link to our QA efforts and release process like 
> http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/QA/7/Test1TreeTesting to avoid the 
> impressions of a lack minute rush up job. The more transparent we are 
> with our development efforts, the better we would be at avoiding 
> misconceptions.

Heh heh, misconception is a much milder word than I used. :)

I guess we should be flattered that it mattered so much to Ladislav that
there no release notes.  And I'm sorry I didn't communicate on this.
The Fedora release engineer caught me on IRC and we decided that we'd
follow the tradition of not worrying about relnotes for test1.  I should
have asked for opinions and help on list.

- Karsten
-- 
Karsten Wade, RHCE, 108 Editor    ^     Fedora Documentation Project 
 Sr. Developer Relations Mgr.     |  fedoraproject.org/wiki/DocsProject
   quaid.108.redhat.com           |          gpg key: AD0E0C41
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