[RFC] making release notes a community effort

[Gavin Henry]

On Tuesday 05 Apr 2005 17:13, Karsten Wade wrote:
> We've been trying to pull together the components to make the release
> notes an effort of the Fedora community.  This means developers
> collaborating with writers.
>
> This will not mean what it has in the past, with developers throwing
> some bits over the wall for release notes and sometimes reading and
> commenting on the drafts.  When Fedora had someone paid to write
> relnotes, this worked.  If we can't make this work as a community effort
> with resources from writers _and_ developers, we may not have any
> release notes.
>
> The first pass at an idea is on this page, scroll down to Release Notes
> Process - Iteration One, April 2005:
>
> http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FedoraDocs/fRelNotes/RelNotesProcess
>
> The basic idea is to break the relnotes down into modules for individual
> or teams of writers to tackle.  Then you would have one or more writers
> dedicated to a project or subset of Linux, such as kernel, network
> services, printing, UI/desktop, SELinux, etc.  Then it is easier to keep
> the dedicated writing resource informed throughout the development
> process.
>
> Hopefully this makes it possible for a volunteer writer to actually have
> a chance to write an accurate relnotes piece in time for test or
> release.
>
> I'd like to keep this part of the discussion f-devel-l, but have Cc:'d
> f-docs-l so everyone is aware it.  Reply-to is set to keep the
> discussion on f-devel-list.
>
> We're also debating the merits of single source in Wiki or DocBook/XML.
> Advantages of the former are the ease of collaboration and getting new
> writers able to contribute sooner.  The advantages of XML are too
> numerous to mention, but it does suffer from a longer learning curve.
> If you have any comments on that, the tool choice discussion is
> happening on f-docs-l.  Regardless, we'll make sure the release notes
> are in the proper format on the file system for Anaconda to use.

What format would be good for inexperienced users to submit patches/docs in, 
that could be parsed by either Perl or Python, which then pumps out Docbook 
XML?

Either via command line or a cgi/mod_perl/mod_python page?

-- 
Kind Regards,

Gavin Henry.
Managing Director.

T +44 (0) 1224 279484
M +44 (0) 7930 323266
F +44 (0) 1224 742001
E ghenry at suretecsystems.com

Open Source. Open Solutions(tm).

http://www.suretecsystems.com/
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