Some thoughts on beat writing

[Paul W. Frields]

On Wed, Nov 26, 2008 at 01:27:33PM -0500, John J. McDonough wrote:
> 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.

I think there is a better way -- feeding package information to beats
is simply not a good one.  We had to change a lot of the Amateur Radio
beat for that very reason.  Simply listing the results of 'yum info'
or 'yum search', or producing a listing of changed version numbers,
and calling that release notes devalues the process a bit.  It would
be fine, however, to give people a command they could use to produce
that info locally to save space for more relevant and rich content.

> 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).

The nice thing about fedorapeople.org and our personal wiki pages is
we can hand out all the grody hacks we like.  (I do that too.) ;-)

> 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!

I intend to be off the keyboard (or at least, working on nothing
beyond my own personal development projects) as much of the weekend as
I can, so I can come back more energized.  I hope you enjoy yours too!

-- 
Paul W. Frields                                http://paul.frields.org/
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  irc.freenode.net: stickster @ #fedora-docs, #fedora-devel, #fredlug
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