It was cool to see the naming scheme Sparks chose for the beats: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Documentation_Beats https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Documentation_Boot_Beats In my mind, the beats were always potentially more than just release notes. The Fedora Weekly News actually uses the beats concept more successfully -- the natural flow from writer to the audience in a single publication makes sense. By contrast, the release notes have always suffered from content that might have been better in other locations ... that didn't exist. This undermined the organizing of the content. For Fedora 10, we devised a new scheme -- major chapters that pulled the beats in various nestings using the power of modular XML files converted 1:1 from the wiki pages. Now that we have a larger documentation base and greater need for updated content, I wonder if now is a good time for the beats to take on a larger purpose? Providing the stream of content that feeds in to all the myriad documentation. Does that pervert the usefulness of the beats to the release notes? Or rather provide a way to clean them up a bit? For example, there is often content in the release notes that could be in the Installation Guide[1]. We maintained a long piece originally by Tommy Reynolds about building custom kernel packages, which finally migrated to the wiki and remains with a reference.[2] And so on. There seems to be a use for filtered and unfiltered feeds of content that the Docs Project can use to populate parts of various documents, instead of just jamming it all in to the release notes. ;-) The mailing list 'fedora-relnotes-content'[3] that receives release notes reports has always provided information useful to other documents. Lest you think I'm crazy suggesting a process change this late in the F11 release cycle, I don't think it has to be that much of a difference. More of an awareness to share with beat writers -- gather content that might have meaning beyond just release notes, and Docs will parse it to the right content home. - Karsten [1] http://docs.fedoraproject.org/release-notes/f10/en_US/What_is_New_for_Installation_and_Live_Images.html#sn-Installation_related_issues [2] http://docs.fedoraproject.org/release-notes/f10/en_US/How_are_Things_for_Developers.html#sn-Preparing_for_kernel_development [3] https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-relnotes-content Receives relnotes@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx, release notes bugzilla reports/fedora_requires_release_notes flags, used to watch the Docs/Beats.* changes in the MoinMoin wiki, good place to send a feed of all changes to the beat pages. -- Karsten 'quaid' Wade, Community Gardener http://quaid.fedorapeople.org AD0E0C41
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