Re: Some thoughts on beat writing

[Dale Bewley <dlbewley lib ucdavis edu>]

----- "Karsten Wade" <kwade redhat com> wrote:
> So, yes, there is a novel idea here -- a permanent beat page on the
> wiki that has:
> 
> * Commands to use to get more info about packages (yum info, rpm -q
>   --changelog)
> 
> * List of packages for that section
> 
> * Programmatically generated changes between FN and FN-1

I hadn't pondered digging into the sqlite files. I found koji to be helpful for finding the version delta of packages across (non-EOL) distributions.

My messy hack is here

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/DaleBewley#Virtualization_Release_Notes

* pkgs.in contains CSV package name, relnotes URL
* dist.in contains f9, f10, etc

#!/bin/bash
grep -v '^#' pkgs.in | while read line; do
    grep -v '^#' dist.in | while read dist; do
            pkg=`echo $line | awk '{print $1}'`
            notes=`echo $line | awk '{print $2}'`
            ver=`koji latest-pkg "$dist" "$pkg" | tail -1 | awk '{print $1}'`
            echo "$pkg, $dist, $ver, $notes"
    done
done

I then read the upstream relnotes for each release since the last Fedora distribution to produce a summary of changes for the Fedora relnotes.

John mentioned a page to augment a beat for tracking changes. That may be an appropriate use of the discussion tab on an article. As a new beat writer, I used my personal page for that.

I think a page of tips like this will be very helpful.