On Sun, 2010-08-01 at 01:20 +0900, Юрий Хабаров wrote: > John, > > Thank you for your answer. > > If it won't impede you, can you describe me, who are "Beat Writers", > please ? > > Yuri Khabarov. Yuri Good question. I think we have a page somewhere describing it, and I think it is probably badly out of date! One of the things I need to do is to figure out what we have and make it useful. Basically, the idea of a beat writer is kind of taken from the newspapers. A beat writer selects a particular area of interest and then develops an understanding of what is happening in that area for the upcoming release. The starting point is the "Feature Pages". However, these only cover the truly major features. Fedora now has over 15,000 packages and for any release a significant portion of those get updated. Part of what the beat writer should do is to look at upcoming changes in those packages and explore whether the change needs to be documented. In recent releases, we try to only document "significant" changes in the Release Notes. But it takes someone with some feeling for the particular area to see what is significant, especially from a user perspective. What isn't significant to a developer might be very significant to a user. The various beats are each quite different. The database beat, for example, consists almost entirely of MySQL, Postgres and SQLite and their associated support packages. The development tools beat, on the other hand, has hundreds of packages. So the beat writer might explore the upstream release notes, perhaps talk with developers or maintainers, and decide that a particular changes requires something in the Release Notes. He then drafts something on the wiki. Depending on the change, he might ask a maintainer to review his draft to be sure he didn't mis-state something. As we get close to Beta we will clean up and perhaps triage what is on the wiki, then convert it do DocBook/Publican for release. We try to get most of it in beta so that folks can submit bug reports against any issues in the Release Notes prior to final release. We will also try to get as much translation done as possible for Beta, although the real thing is for final release. Between beta and final release we will try to minimize unnecessary changes so there isn't a lot of material that needs to be re-translated. Translation is done by the L10N team, and we try to work closely with them, managing changes and providing them with nightly builds of the entire document in all the languages as the translation progresses. So, that's kind of it in a summary. I suspect I wasn't concise enough with some things, probably glossed over others, but that is the way the Beat Writers contribute to the Release Notes. The current beats, along with the names of folks who have spoken up for them, are at https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Documentation_Beats Hope that helps --McD -- docs mailing list docs@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe: https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/docs
