Advancing the beats

[Karsten Wade]

It was cool to see the naming scheme Sparks chose for the beats:

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Documentation_Beats
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Documentation_Boot_Beats

In my mind, the beats were always potentially more than just release
notes.  The Fedora Weekly News actually uses the beats concept more
successfully -- the natural flow from writer to the audience in a
single publication makes sense.

By contrast, the release notes have always suffered from content that
might have been better in other locations ... that didn't exist.  This
undermined the organizing of the content.  For Fedora 10, we devised a
new scheme -- major chapters that pulled the beats in various nestings
using the power of modular XML files converted 1:1 from the wiki
pages.

Now that we have a larger documentation base and greater need for
updated content, I wonder if now is a good time for the beats to take
on a larger purpose?  Providing the stream of content that feeds in to
all the myriad documentation.  Does that pervert the usefulness of the
beats to the release notes?  Or rather provide a way to clean them up
a bit?

For example, there is often content in the release notes that could be
in the Installation Guide[1].  We maintained a long piece originally
by Tommy Reynolds about building custom kernel packages, which finally
migrated to the wiki and remains with a reference.[2] And so on.

There seems to be a use for filtered and unfiltered feeds of content
that the Docs Project can use to populate parts of various documents,
instead of just jamming it all in to the release notes. ;-) The
mailing list 'fedora-relnotes-content'[3] that receives release notes
reports has always provided information useful to other documents.

Lest you think I'm crazy suggesting a process change this late in the
F11 release cycle, I don't think it has to be that much of a
difference.  More of an awareness to share with beat writers -- gather
content that might have meaning beyond just release notes, and Docs
will parse it to the right content home.

- Karsten

[1] http://docs.fedoraproject.org/release-notes/f10/en_US/What_is_New_for_Installation_and_Live_Images.html#sn-Installation_related_issues

[2] http://docs.fedoraproject.org/release-notes/f10/en_US/How_are_Things_for_Developers.html#sn-Preparing_for_kernel_development

[3] https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-relnotes-content

Receives relnotes at fedoraproject.org, release notes bugzilla
reports/fedora_requires_release_notes flags, used to watch the
Docs/Beats.* changes in the MoinMoin wiki, good place to send a feed
of all changes to the beat pages.
-- 
Karsten 'quaid' Wade, Community Gardener
http://quaid.fedorapeople.org
AD0E0C41
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