Yelp 2.27.1, Now With More Ducks

[Shaun McCance <shaunm gnome org>]

I've just released Yelp 2.27.1, Now With More Ducks.
This coincides with gnome-doc-utils 0.17.1, Also Now
With More Ducks.  This marks the first release with
Mallard support built in.  And this marks the end of
the boring part of the release announcement.

This is a huge shift in how we approach, plan, write,
and generally work with documentation.  The entire
community needs to be aware of what's happening and
how it affects them.  Fellow hackers, please skip to
the bottom for information on how this affects you.

Mallard is a new[1] documentation format that is geared
towards topic-oriented help.  While you could, in theory,
just convert all of your DocBook documentation to Mallard,
what you would end up with is a document that is the worst
of both worlds.  Writing topic-based help requires a new
way of thinking about how we present information to our
readers.

Mallard is uniquely designed from the ground up to support
downstream modification and plugin-based help systems with
little to no patching.  The dynamic organization structure
of Mallard was designed with our help in mind, addressing
the challenges we face as an upstream provider.

If you're interested in writing, editing, reviewing, or
otherwise contributing to our documentation, please get
in touch with our team.  You can email use at
  gnome-doc-list gnome org
or join us in the #docs channel on irc.gnome.org.  Also,
check out our brand new project blog:
  http://blogs.gnome.org/docs/

We will be holding regular community meetings.  Stay
tuned for more details.

If you are a maintainer or active developer, know that we
are coming for your documentation.  It might not be today,
but it's on our radar.  If you or someone on your team
handles your documentation independently of our team, we
still want to be in contact to help them produce better
help.  Writing is not a one-person task.

We hope that developers will be cooperative with our team
as we try to provide them with better help files to make
their software better for their users.

We also hope that more people from the greater community,
including our downstream communities, will get involved
with our team.  We are doing some truly exciting things
right now, and we'd love to share the excitement.

Fearlessly,
Shaun

[1] Yes, I realize I've been quacking since 2004.  But
it's newly released, and that counts for something.