[RFC] making release notes a community effort

[Karsten Wade]

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.

- Karsten
-- 
Karsten Wade, RHCE * Sr. Tech Writer * http://people.redhat.com/kwade/
gpg fingerprint:  2680 DBFD D968 3141 0115    5F1B D992 0E06 AD0E 0C41   
                       Red Hat SELinux Guide
http://www.redhat.com/docs/manuals/enterprise/RHEL-4-Manual/selinux-guide/
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