Some thoughts on beat writing

[John J. McDonough]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Karsten Wade" <kwade at redhat.com>
To: <fedora-docs-list at redhat.com>
Sent: Monday, December 08, 2008 2:24 PM
Subject: Re: Some thoughts on beat writing


kind of a separate subject so a separate reply ...

> This is similar to the long requested, sometimes provided,
> and always dubious "list of packages changed for this release."

Yes, well, I've made a couple of runs at this.  I have one hack that 
generates a MediaWiki import file containing the yum description and table 
of versions for a beat.  It is kind of a trail of bread crumbs, though, and 
probably not all that useful to anyone but me.

A slightly less hack-ey, but still somethng of a hack, I did more recently 
following a thread with Paul, maybe on IRC I can't recall.  But I got to 
wondering whether I could do something that someone else might actually use. 
Still a bit of a hack but again, given a list of packages in the beat, 
compares two sqlite files.  Thus, a beat writer could keep the 
primary.sqlite from F10, grab the primary.sqlite from rawhide, and see what 
has changed.  I mentioned this during the last docs meeting, hoping to get 
some input from others but no joy.  I think this, perhaps prettied up 
somewhat and with substantial guidance, actually gives the beat writer a 
shot.

The writer is still faced with figuring out what is actualy in the beat, and 
this is harder than it sounds.  An obvious place would be the PackageKit 
groups, but these are a lot less helpful than you would suspect.   There is 
a lot of room for judgement in assigning a package to a group, and, IMO, 
many just plain errors.  In some cases when you see a package in some odd 
group you can imagine how someone felt it belonged there.  But even in those 
cases, you would be hard pressed to imagine groups that you should check. 
And with 11,000 packages, you just glaze over pawing trough package after 
package.

--McD