Release notes for F9

[Paul W. Frields]

* For Fedora 9, the release notes and its derivative documents such as
the release summary, press release, et al. should take care not to
trumpet version number changes in the absence of other details that talk
about improvements visible to "normal users."  One of the most popular
Linux podcasts brought this up during their segment on Fedora 8.  Saying
things like "Fedora 9 has FooBar 1.8" is not as meaningful as making
brief reference to the many wonderful improvements in FooBar 1.8 since
whatever FooBar was in Fedora 8.

* For F9 the Release Summary should be drawn directly from the OverView
beat to the greatest extent possible.  The OverView beat should feature
content that is the most meaningful to end users, developers, and
community members using the Fedora platform.  If this means the Release
Summary is a verbatim copy of that beat, there is no harm in that.  In
fact, this offers a severalfold increase in effectiveness and
efficiency, since (1) the OverView beat is the first chunk of meaningful
release-related content people see in the Release Notes proper; (2) the
OverView beat goes through a translation process, meaning the
ambassadors and other content consumers can use a localized version for
publicizing new Fedora features; and (3) this prevents duplicative
effort in content collation, editing, and publication.

* For F9, it is highly unlikely that I will participate in the release
notes process to the extent I did the past two or three releases.  We
have a number of contributors stepping up to help, and it is high time
that I made sure not to silo this work.  I have already been working
with Jason Taylor to get him up to speed on the process, and hopefully
we can all encourage others to help as well.  The Release Notes, as an
entity, is one of the crowning jewels of the Docs Project, especially
since Karsten overhauled our process to really make these a great
example of community content creation.  We should make sure that their
direction is "onward and upward," and that we make it as easy as
possible for people to contribute to them, adapt them as needed, and
continue to make them the source for release-related information.

-- 
Paul W. Frields, RHCE                          http://paul.frields.org/
  gpg fingerprint: 3DA6 A0AC 6D58 FEC4 0233  5906 ACDB C937 BD11 3717
           Fedora Project: http://pfrields.fedorapeople.org/
  irc.freenode.net: stickster @ #fedora-docs, #fedora-devel, #fredlug
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