Date: Thu, 14 Jun 2001 08:45:38 -0400 (EDT) From: Robert Watson <rwatson@FreeBSD.org> To: Dima Dorfman <dima@unixfreak.org> Cc: hackers@FreeBSD.org Subject: Re: FreeBSD Monthly Development Status Report, June 2001 Message-ID: <Pine.NEB.3.96L.1010614083836.23699G-100000@fledge.watson.org> In-Reply-To: <20010614024036.2B39F3E28@bazooka.unixfreak.org>
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On Wed, 13 Jun 2001, Dima Dorfman wrote: > Robert Watson <rwatson@FreeBSD.org> writes: > > - Future Editions > > > > Assuming there is some positive feedback on this idea, and that future > > submissions get made such that there is content for future issues, the > > goal is to release a development status report once a month. [...] > > If this ends up being the case (i.e., there's an issue approx. once a > month), how about archiving them on the web site? We used to have a > "newsletter", but it quickly grew stale. This sounds like something > developers actually might be interested in (there's no glory in writing > something if nobody knows about it ;-) ), so it has a much better chance > of succeeding. > > I don't know if it's worth putting the first issue up not knowing if > there will be more; anybody else have an opinion on this? Well, at this point I've received a lot of positive feedback indicating that people like the report (I'd be happy to keep receiving it however :-), so it's my plan to do it for at least another month. Given that people seem to find it useful, the primary factor in continuing it will therefore be the degree to which I'm successful in extracting status reports from the develops :-). I'd be happy to see integration into the web site, either (as Alexey Zelkin suggests) as part of an existing projects page, or some other mechanism. I know that Alexey's projects.freebsd.org project is a little stalled right now as we need developers to do some final tweaks on its scripting/etc and figure out how to integrate it into the FreeBSD.org cluster, but in the future I'm also interested in providing easy web submission for reports, if people would find that useful. That said, I think there's a lot of value to a push-format e-mail newsletter--as a developer, I'm much more likely to catch everything if the information is pushed to me (although an online archive and reference is useful also). I have to admit that my knowledge of various mark-up languages (beyond a dirty knowledge of nroff and HTML) is pretty... abysmal, so I'd very much appreciate assistance in getting it converted to an appropriate format. It sounds like Chris Costello has an SGML-ification underway already, so now it's a question of figuring out placement. If someone can provide me with a decent template in SGML, I can just paste everything in to it, and generate the plain text from it when I release (well, as long as someone also provides me with a Makefile :-). Or, I can mail it to someone after I've assembled the data and have them do the markup. Thanks for everyone's feedback--as I said above, all that is needed to make this a success is for everyone to remember to submit reports at the end of each month to the submission address I provided. I've had a couple of requests for more pointed reminders (perhaps in the style of the GNATS status e-mail for current committers, in addition to broadcasts to hackers@ for non-committers), and I will probably follow up on that. In my mind, the real definition of success here involves two factors: having content for people to read, and having people who read the content. Robert N M Watson FreeBSD Core Team, TrustedBSD Project robert@fledge.watson.org NAI Labs, Safeport Network Services To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
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