On Wed, Nov 26, 2008 at 01:27:33PM -0500, John J. McDonough wrote:
Paul I appreciate the feedback.
I do have a few thoughts on specific ways things might be made better for
new beat writers, but I also imagined that if other beat writers engaged
in the conversation, better ideas would emerge.
A little shooting from the hip:
1) Seed the beats, especially the untouched beats, with the information
available from yum. This can be done programatically, and I would be
willing to work on that, but I suspect that there may be a better way,
and in any case, the mapping of packages to beats is something that
probably needs to be easily editable, and that raises some issues I
haven't reconciled.
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. 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.
2) Provide some relatively automatic way for a beat writer to know
what
has changed within his domain without grazing all 11K packages. I will
do this for myself for F11, whether I can do it in a way that is
appropriate in a production environment, I'm less sure. (I'm a big fan
of really grody hacks).
The nice thing about
fedorapeople.org and our personal wiki pages is
we can hand out all the grody hacks we like. (I do that too.) ;-)
3) Provide new beat writers with an assigned mentor, preferably
someone
with at least some familiarity with the beat content, as well, of course,
as the process.
I'm pretty sure other beat writers out there have much better ideas but
they are keeping their mouths shut. Perhaps I should have waited a few
more days. Indeed, with the holiday fast upon us, many of the stateside
beat writers are probably already headed off to their turkeys, leaving
their laptops alone and lonely over the long weekend. On the other hand,
perhaps some will emerge from their tryptophan haze in a talkative mood!
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!
--
Paul W. Frields
http://paul.frields.org/
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