docs February 2009

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36 participants
62 discussions

Preparing for F11 Release Notes
by John J. McDonough 03 Feb '09

03 Feb '09

In going through the wiki removing hash marks, I noticed that there are a number of places where there is content that we want to keep for F11, so I guess we probably don't want to be too reckless in the pre-F11 cleanup. On the other hand, I was reminded while doing that is that one reason that we may want to issue an F10 update is that some F9 content, which was inappropriate for F10, made it into the F10 release notes. So we definitely want to be a little more thorough in our scrubbing. --McD

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New Beat Writers
by John J. McDonough 03 Feb '09

03 Feb '09

Last week a couple of new beat writers asked to "tag along" and get a feel for the beat writing thing. I thought I would describe what I've been doing to prepare for Fedora 11. First of all, you have seen some emails regarding Fedora 10, all about git and pot files and all that nonsense. That has nothing to do with the normal beat writer gig, and has only to do with my personal interest in understanding the whole process. Beat writers capture the prose in the wiki. Paul (for F10), and Ryan (for F11) work some maic under cover of darkness to turn those wiki notes into an RPM in 40 languages. The beat writer doesn't have to do that, but I'm a masochist and said I'd do it for F12, and help Ryan with F11, so I better learn how. To start on F11 I've been clearing out my wiki pages of the junk left over from F10. I have a couple more to do that held some update material for F10. Now that the updated stuff is in the repository, I can blow away those last remnants of F10 on the wiki. I've been keeping an eye on the features page https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/11/FeatureList This is/should be the primary source for new features. And if you read the definition of a feature https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/Policy/Definitions Those are pretty much the things we would like to write about. The problem is, a lot of things creep into the release that fit that definition, but are never viewed by the feature wrangler. Usually they are things that affect a smaller audience, but if something changes those people who use it need to know. Sometimes they need to do something to make it work, sometimes there is just a new feature they might make use of. I've also been watching the SIG pages for my beats, well those that have SIGs, anyway. Often these can provide an early warning of something that is going to show up. I have also been keeping an eye on the devel-list and on the Fedora "info" RSS feed. Both of these are awfully noisy, though. Still, even though I only give the RSS feed a quick scroll through, every so often something leaps out at me that I had missed. To be honest, my main bread and butter source is an ugly little program I wrote http://jjmcd.fedorapeople.org/Download/checkBeat.tar.gz This gives me a list of things in my beats that have changed in rawhide since F10. it also provides me with a link (if the yum database contains a link) to the project's page. I've been going out to those pages, tracking down the release notes for the upstream, and capturing interesting bits in sub-pages of https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/User:Jjmcd/Drafts Ultimately I will assemble these notes into some sort of (hopefully) readable prose for the release notes. This is probably overkill for a smaller beat, but for DevTools, it is a life saver. Since there seem to be so many changes in the DevTools beat, and it sounds like it will be a while before it settles, I'll probably start crafting some prose for the Amateur Radio and Embedded beats for F11 before seriously diving into DevTools, although there is so much work there that I'll need to get started promptly. I expect there will be a mass recompile shortly after the alpha release, and if my suspicions are correct, that may drive some changes that need to be reported, so I'm taking my DevTools data so far as kind of "alpha". You have probably seen some notes from Karsten and Ryan talking about what the release notes should look like in the future. I have some thoughts there, too, and I hope to build an example using the Amateur Radio beat, which is large enough to be interesting, but not so large that it's unmanageable. I'll spend some time there in the next few weeks, too. So that's where I am. If you see a beat that you have an interest in, put your name on the list. The detective work is kind of fun, and for most beats not too onerous. Then you can tell others what's cool about Fedora 11 in your corner of the world. And that goes not only for my "shadows", but for anyone who has an interest in some part of the business and would like to learn more about some specific area and share what they learned with others. It's kinda fun to be the fire hose instead of drinking from it! --McD

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docs February 2009