On Thu, Feb 05, 2009 at 02:54:26PM -0500, John J. McDonough wrote:
----- Original Message ----- From: "Paul W. Frields"
<stickster(a)gmail.com>
To: <fedora-docs-list(a)redhat.com>
Sent: Thursday, February 05, 2009 2:26 PM
Subject: Re: F11 Alpha Release Notes one-sheet
> I'd hope we're not summarizing 100+ changed packages on any beat,
> right? That would seem like overkill to me.
I hope not. However, the Amateur Radio beat, for example, has 35
changed/new packages. Some of the changes are minor, but quite a few are
totally new packages, some very interesting, and a large number of the
changes are very significant, at least to folks who use those packages.
I was thinking of that as a bar -- ideally the beat writer knows the
audience well enough to adjust content.
So, for the average desktop user and related beat, we don't want to
see all the GNOME/KDE package churn.
But for something technical and more niche such as amateur radio (or
even developers), the bar should be different.
On changes, though, I'm a little torn. A long list of changes is
pretty
unexciting to read through, but if you are the person affected by that
change, it could be critical. As a minimum you need a heads-up on the
change and a link to the upstream's release notes, if such a thing
exists. Unfortunately, it seems like in a lot of cases the upstream
release notes are nonexistent or very weak, and it takes some detective
work to sort out what changed. I feel bad about leaving that to the
reader, but I don't want to end up with an encyclopedia, either.
So we play the balancing act.
Agreed, we cannot be in the game of doing upstream research; the real
goal is to identify the Fedora intersection. Your style certainly
gives enough information for people to work from; the niche audience
knows how to find more information when they care to.
- Karsten
--
Karsten 'quaid' Wade, Community Gardener
http://quaid.fedorapeople.org
AD0E0C41