Some thoughts on beat writing

[John J. McDonough]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Paul W. Frields" <stickster at gmail.com>
To: <fedora-docs-list at redhat.com>
Sent: Wednesday, November 26, 2008 7:19 PM
Subject: Re: Some thoughts on beat writing

> I think there is a better way -- feeding package information
> to beats is simply not a good one.  We had to change a lot
> of the Amateur Radio beat for that very reason.  Simply
> listing the results of 'yum info' or 'yum search', or producing
> a listing of changed version numbers, and calling that release
> notes devalues the process a bit.

Oh absolutely.  The yum info stuff merely gives the beat writer some view 
into what's there.  Once he recognizes the version change, the beat writer 
would then go to the project website (also listed in the yum info), review 
the upstream's release notes (where available), make a judgement as to 
whether they really needed comment, and then devise the release notes entry.

I do think that the yum info is a good start for the "what's there" page 
that the release notes might point to.  I do think the beat writer should, 
however, be encouraged to embellish the yum description.  But at least it is 
a start.  A nice summary should go into the release notes preceding the 
changes, but it should be very brief, perhaps one or two sentences.

I did the amateur radio stuff long before I fully understood what was needed 
in the relnotes, and by the time I figured out how to figure out what 
changed, we were well into the period where we weren't making big changes to 
the wiki and I was reluctant to make massive revisions.  If I had known you 
were going to get stuck with that, I would have been more than happy to go 
do it.

> It would be fine, however, to give people a command they could
> use to produce that info locally to save space for more relevant
> and rich content.

My aproach was kind of heavy handed, but having written down what is really 
needed, something that addresses the minimum needed functionality might be 
more approachable.  I'll have to noodle on that.  Actually, sqlite3 is a 
pretty handy piece of software in its own right!

> I intend to be off the keyboard (or at least, working on nothing
> beyond my own personal development projects) as much of the
> weekend as I can, so I can come back more energized.  I hope
> you enjoy yours too!

Well good for you.  You deserve the break.  We'll actually be celebrating 
Thanksgiving Friday -- the kids need to work Thursday.  I've actually been 
toying with the possibility of spending Thursday melting solder to get away 
from the keyboard addiction myself.

Enjoy your Thanksgiving.

--McD