Release note beats for F9?

[Paul W. Frields]

On Mon, 2008-03-10 at 21:26 +1000, Murray McAllister wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> Thanks everyone for your help so far. I have left a few questions in line:
> 
> On Wed, Mar 5, 2008 at 11:15 AM, Paul W. Frields <stickster at gmail.com> wrote:
> > On Wed, 2008-03-05 at 09:29 +1000, Murray McAllister wrote:
> >  > On Sat, Mar 1, 2008 at 11:06 AM, Paul W. Frields <stickster at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > > >  Probably correct.  In the past Karsten and I -- for the most part --
> >  > >  took care of organizing the Release Notes and the Installation Guide.
> >  > >  Speaking in shame only for myself, I haven't spent much time on looking
> >  > >  at Docs Project schedule adherence over the past month or so.
> >  > >
> >  > >  The things that need to happen:
> >  > >
> >  > >  * Check schedule to make sure it agrees with reality, since it was
> >  > >  drafted some time ago.
> 
> Is this the schedule: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/DocsProject/Schedule
> 
> Is one day (between the 16th and 17th of March), enough time to
> convert the wiki to docbook? Or should the wiki freeze take place
> earlier, in case there are any issues?

We've been able to do this in the past -- I think if a couple people
make themselves available to advise and help you, it can get done.  What
we need to do now is establish when you're going to want to do this, and
coordinate that with those people's schedules given the timezone
difference.  

Fortunately, this schedule has us freezing on a Sunday evening (for most
of North America), and converting by Monday evening (again, NA).  That
makes this an opportune time for American Docs people to make themselves
available to help.  I can commit to being around and helping at any time
Sunday, and Monday for that matter.

The work to do during that time is to check and fix the XML tagging of
the beats once they are committed to CVS.


> >  > >  * Send additional messages to f-devel-l to get community members to
> >  > >  write information on the wiki under Docs/Beats/* for their desired
> >  > >  areas.
> 
> I think I did this here:
> 
> https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-docs-list/2008-March/msg00049.html

Actually no -- that was a message to the fedora-*docs*-list asking
people to help.  What is also needed is a message to fedora-*DEVEL*-list
to remind community members to write any information into the wiki that
they'd like to make it into the release notes.

> >  > >
> >  > >  * Update the DocsDict page as needed, and clear out old content in each
> >  > >  Beat, while retaining the new, using the page's "Get Info" history as a
> >  > >  clue on how to preserve data.
> 
> Is this it: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/DocsDict
> 
> I'm not sure what this is, or what is required...

Just an update to the version numbers shown in that page.  These are
referenced elsewhere in the beats themselves using wiki macros.

For example, the wiki macro:
  [[GetVal(DocsDict,BeatsVer)]]
Yields the text:
  9

We would use this particular entry in the beats often, like this:
  There is lots to love in Fedora [[GetVal(DocsDict,BeatsVer)]].
Which yields:
  There is lots to love in Fedora 9.

The other DocsDict entries are for specific subsystem versions (GNOME,
KDE, httpd, etc.), and should be updated similarly based on Rawhide
repository contents for now.

> >  > >
> >  > >  * Find a responsible maintainer in the Docs community who will be
> >  > >  accountable for Release Notes content conversion, tracking, and
> >  > >  packaging.  That person will need to make noise and get Docs
> >  > >  contributors to assist as needed.  I'll make myself available to help.
> 
> This was my plan for the release notes, please advise if it is
> wrong/will make everything explode:
> 
> 1. checkout release-notes/devel (I did this earlier).
> 2. follow the instructions here:
> http://cvs.fedoraproject.org/viewcvs/release-notes/devel/xmlbeats/steps-to-convert-FC7.txt?root=docs&view=markup
> 
> Massive kudos to the people who made those scripts possible!
> 
> 3. chuck the xml files in the release-notes/devel/en_US directory
> 4. make pot (?)
> 5. commit.
> 
> Thanks again for your help.

This won't make things explode, but there are some things you'll want to
make sure are finished first:

-1.  Make sure Beats are made ready properly, with old content removed,
and new content copy- and markup-edited, to make the XML conversion
easier.

-0.  Compare Beats that don't change often (Overview? Colophon? others?)
and make a list of them.  Avoid committing new ugly XML versions over
top of old but still 95% useful versions, since then you have to go
through a bunch of retagging that's already been done before.  Instead,
simply hand-edit in small changes to make life easier on translators
(the more strings that stay the same, the easier their lives are).  This
is very much like what you would do for the F9 GA release notes, when
updating them from the F9 PR versions.

1.  ... continue as above ...

-- 
Paul W. Frields                                http://paul.frields.org/
  gpg fingerprint: 3DA6 A0AC 6D58 FEC4 0233  5906 ACDB C937 BD11 3717
  http://redhat.com/   -  -  -  -   http://pfrields.fedorapeople.org/
  irc.freenode.net: stickster @ #fedora-docs, #fedora-devel, #fredlug
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