Re: User oriented release notes

["Murray Cumming" <murrayc murrayc com>]

> On Mon, 11 Sep 2006 02:16:56 +0300
> Enver ALTIN <ealtin parkyeri com> wrote:
>
> > On Sat, 2006-09-09 at 12:40 +0200, Claus Schwarm wrote:
> > > Our release notes should not be a workaround for our ugly 'About'
> > > section. This is a bad and useless habit of the GNOME release notes.
> >
> > I can't see why it's a bad habit, I'd love if you could explain.
>
> Hi!
>
> Three reasons:
>
>  (1) You should not waste your time to work-around 'bugs', anyway. You
> should fix the bug if possible.

If there's a bug then it should of course be fixed.

>  (2) People want the new information quickly - see "Inverted Pyramid
> Format" for news stories. [1]
>
>  (3) The release notes are published on the web: It's easy to make a
> link to the proper section, and thus not waste the time of people who
> know what GNOME is.
>
>
> Cheers,
> Claus
>
> [1] http://live.gnome.org/MarketingTeam/WritingPressReleasesHowto

Press releases are for a different audience (journalists), who are used to
looking for the overview at the end, in the description of the
organisations mentioned.

But the release notes are read by a much wider public, and by far more
people than normally read other GNOME web pages. For those people, it
would be very frustrating to read a page about what's new in XYZ without
first being told briefly what XYZ is. The description of GNOME was added
to solve this problem, and removing the description of GNOME would just
bring the problem back.

If I've misunderstood what you were talking about, I'm sorry.

Murray Cumming
murrayc murrayc com
www.murrayc.com
www.openismus.com