Oo ---- Envoyé avec BlackBerry® d'Orange ---- -----Original Message----- From: AllenJB <gentoo-li...@allenjb.me.uk>
Date: Mon, 26 Jan 2009 21:30:34 To: <gentoo-dev@lists.gentoo.org> Subject: [gentoo-dev] PR Project Activity Issues Hi all, The Gentoo PR Project currently appears to be having difficulties with keeping up, both with the newsletters and announcements, and I believe this is currently reflecting badly on the project as a whole. These issues are apparently holding back some key changes to the Gentoo website to make it easier to navigate and help the project appear more active than is reflected by the current front page. If the project needs more hands, and these aren't appearing, then perhaps more should be done to advertise the positions and exactly what they entail (I would suggest announcements on the forums, with specifics on who to talk to for those interested). The newsletter has been having issues for some time, and this makes me wonder if the amount of effort required is excessive for the value obtained from those efforts. While the GuideXML system Gentoo uses for newsletters, etc is nice, does it require too much time and effort to convert articles to GuideXML and get the newsletters published? Alternative setups for the newsletter could be to either go text-only or web-only. Text-only would involved producing a text-only email, which is then copied and pasted onto the website for archiving. This would obviously require minimal formatting work. My idea for a web-only setup would require more initial work, but I think would make maintenance much easier once set up. The Gentoo Newsletter would become a separate website, not based on GuideXML, but on a standard CMS. Instead of having set release dates (weekly or monthly), articles would just be released as soon as they are produced. The regular features like bug stats, GLSAs, developer changes could be easily generated automatically (I suspect almost all of those are mostly done automatically anyway - adapting such scripts for a CMS that can publish from RSS feeds should be relatively trivial) and would appear on the website without any intervention. As above, articles would be published as and when they are ready. Instead of just 1 editor, this website-based setup would be able to have multiple editors with little collaboration required (just to mark submissions as being worked on when an editor picks them up, which should be easily doable using a ticket-based system (bugzilla) or mailing list). An advantage, as I see it, of the website-based system is that it could be expanded to include features not currently easily possible with the current newsletter - categorized archiving of articles (not just be publish date) and user comments. While I haven't looked, it's probably possible to even find a CMS which includes email notification of new articles as a feature. AllenJB PS. This did start out as a submission for a council meeting agenda item, but I couldn't stop writing. PPS. To preempt the obvious suggestion: I do intend to become a developer, I just don't feel I have the time to commit right now. That'll hopefully change in ~6 months once I've finished uni and have a job.
