Release notes overhaul

[Paul W. Frields]

Do you want to see Release Notes disappear in Fedora 10?

No?  I thought not. :-)

But as I see it, the process is at some risk -- part of it works great:
the beats process.  Well OK, it works pretty well.  The *concept* is
great, and has been proven many times over, and also works for other
projects like Fedora Weekly News.

But we need people to actively comb through the responsibility list and
find people to take care of those beats now as we start to gear up for
F10 Alpha and beyond, toward the final release in the autumn.

But the wiki platform has changed.  Hopefully we will have a DocBook
converter for MediaWiki shortly, but I don't know if there's a
definitive status for that yet.

In the past, I've been one of the folks who's helped with the release
notes process, but I don't expect to have that kind of time on my hands
for Fedora 10.  If we want to continue having the best Release Notes of
any Linux distribution on the planet, the time to get cracking is
now! :-)

I think the current process pretty much sucks, and I'd be very open to
throwing it away in favor of a publican-based process.  But that process
needs to satisfy several needs:
  * allow wiki based beat creation/editing
  * creates ASCII and HTML versions
  * creates one or more RPM packages that satisfy the current
functionality of fedora-release-notes  (I'm totally happy if they get
split apart, and that may make lots of sense)
  * has to be achievable by more people than me :-)

Here's my plan:
* I will continue to add content if/as needed to
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/User:Pfrields/Drafts/ReleaseNotesHowto to
document how the current process works.
* If you come, be prepared to take on a task and doggedly pursue it to
completion by the following week.  We need action.
* My general idea for the new process is to:
  1. Move each of the pieces of fedora-release-notes into git repos
  2. Write a Makefile for each of the pieces that uses
publican{,-fedora} to build what's needed for new RPMs
  3. Update fedora-release-notes RPM in Package CVS
  4. Get other packages included in comps as appropriate

So if you think this is a beg for help... well, it is. :-)  But we have
quite a handful of weeks to get tasks done.  Who's up to the challenge?

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