New Beat Writers

[John J. McDonough]

Last week a couple of new beat writers asked to "tag along" and get a feel 
for the beat writing thing.  I thought I would describe what I've been doing 
to prepare for Fedora 11.

First of all, you have seen some emails regarding Fedora 10, all about git 
and pot files and all that nonsense.  That has nothing to do with the normal 
beat writer gig, and has only to do with my personal interest in 
understanding the whole process.  Beat writers capture the prose in the 
wiki.  Paul (for F10), and Ryan (for F11) work some maic under cover of 
darkness to turn those wiki notes into an RPM in 40 languages.  The beat 
writer doesn't have to do that, but I'm a masochist and said I'd do it for 
F12, and help Ryan with F11, so I better learn how.

To start on F11 I've been clearing out my wiki pages of the junk left over 
from F10.  I have a couple more to do that held some update material for 
F10.  Now that the updated stuff is in the repository, I can blow away those 
last remnants of F10 on the wiki.

I've been keeping an eye on the features page

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/11/FeatureList

This is/should be the primary source for new features.  And if you read the 
definition of a feature

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/Policy/Definitions

Those are pretty much the things we would like to write about.  The problem 
is, a lot of things creep into the release that fit that definition, but are 
never viewed by the feature wrangler.  Usually they are things that affect a 
smaller audience, but if something changes those people who use it need to 
know.  Sometimes they need to do something to make it work, sometimes there 
is just a new feature they might make use of.

I've also been watching the SIG pages for my beats, well those that have 
SIGs, anyway.  Often these can provide an early warning of something that is 
going to show up.

I have also been keeping an eye on the devel-list and on the Fedora "info" 
RSS feed.  Both of these are awfully noisy, though.  Still, even though I 
only give the RSS feed a quick scroll through, every so often something 
leaps out at me that I had missed.

To be honest, my main bread and butter source is an ugly little program I 
wrote
http://jjmcd.fedorapeople.org/Download/checkBeat.tar.gz

This gives me a list of things in my beats that have changed in rawhide 
since F10.  it also provides me with a link (if the yum database contains a 
link) to the project's page.  I've been going out to those pages, tracking 
down the release notes for the upstream, and capturing interesting bits in 
sub-pages of
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/User:Jjmcd/Drafts
Ultimately I will assemble these notes into some sort of (hopefully) 
readable prose for the release notes.

This is probably overkill for a smaller beat, but for DevTools, it is a life 
saver.

Since there seem to be so many changes in the DevTools beat, and it sounds 
like it will be a while before it settles, I'll probably start crafting some 
prose for the Amateur Radio and Embedded beats for F11 before seriously 
diving into DevTools, although there is so much work there that I'll need to 
get started promptly.  I expect there will be a mass recompile shortly after 
the alpha release, and if my suspicions are correct, that may drive some 
changes that need to be reported, so I'm taking my DevTools data so far as 
kind of "alpha".

You have probably seen some notes from Karsten and Ryan talking about what 
the release notes should look like in the future.  I have some thoughts 
there, too, and I hope to build an example using the Amateur Radio beat, 
which is large enough to be interesting, but not so large that it's 
unmanageable.  I'll spend some time there in the next few weeks, too.

So that's where I am.  If you see a beat that you have an interest in, put 
your name on the list.  The detective work is kind of fun, and for most 
beats not too onerous.  Then you can tell others what's cool about Fedora 11 
in your corner of the world.

And that goes not only for my "shadows", but for anyone who has an interest 
in some part of the business and would like to learn more about some 
specific area and share what they learned with others.  It's kinda fun to be 
the fire hose instead of drinking from it!

--McD