Re: [gentoo-dev] PR Project Activity Issues
Oo Envoyé avec BlackBerry® d'Orange -Original Message- From: AllenJB Date: Mon, 26 Jan 2009 21:30:34 To: 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.
[gentoo-dev] net-im/ejabberd up for grabs
I was maintaining this on behalf of some folks previously, but it could use a new maintainer if someone is so inclined. Caleb
Re: [gentoo-dev] PR Project Activity Issues
On 01:55 Tue 27 Jan , Alec Warner wrote: > Getting Index2 live is I think a different operational issue (that > changes to the website are very slow) and really has nothing to do > with PR aside from them not nagging someone to commit it ;) In this case, Xavier had it ready in early January, and I was blocking on it for the last 2 weeks to write up an announcement. > PR@ is a nghtmare of spam and what I'll term 'crap.' having real > things marked as such with informative subjects would be useful. > having some kind of rotation would be useful having some kind of vague > 'we will read and respond within 3 days unless its a holiday' would be > useful. > > Right now the expectations of pr@ are non-existent and apparently > think the mail is read and answered quickly. In reality only Donnie > reads it and replies; he has a busy as hell personal life and I'm > surprised he manages to read it at all. > > So I would like to set expectations ;) Yes, it would be a good idea to put expectations wherever people find our contact info. Here's roughly what they are: 1. If it is a prewritten news item that needs editing, it will get a quick response. 2. If it is news that is not accompanied by a draft of some sort, no estimated response time. This point is where I think we have the biggest opportunity for improvement. 3. If it is an additional vendor listing for CDs, no estimated response time. These generally get batched and done at extended intervals. 4. If it is a user support request, no estimated response time. Occasionally someone will respond to say that we don't do support at pr@ and point at appropriate places like forums, lists, IRC. -- Thanks, Donnie Donnie Berkholz Developer, Gentoo Linux Blog: http://dberkholz.wordpress.com pgpY0GwXSlcj3.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: [gentoo-dev] PR Project Activity Issues
On 08:42 Tue 27 Jan , AllenJB wrote: > If you have some insight as to why these are apparent issues, please > teach me. I would not have posted this thread if it were not for the > fact that several developers also seem to think there is a problem and > there seems to be no discussion going on that I can see as to what the > causes of the problems are and how to solve them, so I decided to start > one. > > PR has the dubious honor of being probably the most publicly visible of > all the Gentoo projects, so maybe the issues are being blown out of > proportion, but without any discussion there's no way to discover > whether or not this is the case. I guess this is the part that really gets on my nerves. If you have a complaint like this, directly contact the person or group responsible and try to work things out with them. Don't go to the entire developer community as if the sky has fallen. -- Thanks, Donnie Donnie Berkholz Developer, Gentoo Linux Blog: http://dberkholz.wordpress.com pgp7Kl9RpJ2jw.pgp Description: PGP signature
[gentoo-dev] Packages up for grabs
I need to tighten my focus so I can have a larger impact upon Gentoo with the time I have. To that end, I'm stopping maintenance of these packages, which are available for anyone to take: app-misc/colordiff app-shells/fish sys-process/iotop and... The system-config-* collection -- This is a group of the Fedora GUI config tools. Some of them are quite nice and have no decent graphical alternative I know of, such as BIND, NFS, and HTTPD. app-admin/authconfig app-admin/firstboot app-admin/hwbrowser app-admin/system-config-bind app-admin/system-config-date app-admin/system-config-display app-admin/system-config-httpd app-admin/system-config-keyboard app-admin/system-config-language app-admin/system-config-lvm app-admin/system-config-nfs app-admin/system-config-printer app-admin/system-config-samba app-admin/system-config-soundcard app-admin/system-config-users dev-libs/alchemist dev-python/pycups dev-python/pyxf86config dev-python/rhpl dev-python/rhpxl net-dns/bind-dns-keygen sys-apps/hwdata-redhat sys-apps/kudzu sys-apps/usermode sys-libs/libuser sys-libs/system-config-base -- Thanks, Donnie Donnie Berkholz Developer, Gentoo Linux Blog: http://dberkholz.wordpress.com pgphMsgLLqKXO.pgp Description: PGP signature
