Some thoughts on beat writing

[John J. McDonough]

Paul I appreciate the feedback.

I do have a few thoughts on specific ways things might be made better for 
new beat writers, but I also imagined that if other beat writers engaged in 
the conversation, better ideas would emerge.

A little shooting from the hip:

1) Seed the beats, especially the untouched beats, with the information 
available from yum.  This can be done programatically, and I would be 
willing to work on that, but I suspect that there may be a better way, and 
in any case, the mapping of packages to beats is something that probably 
needs to be easily editable, and that raises some issues I haven't 
reconciled.

2) Provide some relatively automatic way for a beat writer to know what has 
changed within his domain without grazing all 11K packages.  I will do this 
for myself for F11, whether I can do it in a way that is appropriate in a 
production environment, I'm less sure.  (I'm a big fan of really grody 
hacks).

3) Provide new beat writers with an assigned mentor, preferably someone with 
at least some familiarity with the beat content, as well, of course, as the 
process.

I'm pretty sure other beat writers out there have much better ideas but they 
are keeping their mouths shut.  Perhaps I should have waited a few more 
days. Indeed, with the holiday fast upon us, many of the stateside beat 
writers are probably already headed off to their turkeys, leaving their 
laptops alone and lonely over the long weekend.  On the other hand, perhaps 
some will emerge from their tryptophan haze in a talkative mood!

--McD