Re: Requesting Approval of Release notes general structure

["Gervais Mulongoy" <gervais mulongoy gmail com>]

Hello everyone,

Let me be clear about this: I am not trying to step on anyone's toes. I am new here, and the fastest way to learn about something is to fail (science 101 anyone?).

I am a newbie at this, thanks for reminding me. But as I understood it there is no lead writer. So please remember that I am offering my help in this regard.

Claus if you want to keep the structure as it is, then that is good. I don't mind it. What I do mind is that everyone should be on-board as to the reasons that things are the way they are. I agree that keeping release notes consistent is a GoodIdea(tm).

On 2/15/07, Claus Schwarm <c schwarm gmx net> wrote:

Hi, Murray!

On Thu, 15 Feb 2007 12:51:54 +0100
Murray Cumming <murrayc murrayc com> wrote:

> I would like to keep the user/admin/developer distinction that we
> added for 2.12 and 2.14:
> http://www.gnome.org/start/2.14/notes/en/
>
> but lost for 2.16:
> http://www.gnome.org/start/2.16/notes/en/
> In fact, I think we just lost the admin and developer stuff.
>
> Was this a conscious decision at the time?
>

It wasn't discussed on the ml. I just thought it makes sense and nobody
objected.

The distinction according to the role of the reader has no value:
We often need users to read the stuff for developers or admins.

I agree with Claus here. Release notes apply to the entire platform. There shouldn't be any reason to make special notes for special people.
 

For example, think the new development suite: It's clearly news for
developers, only. But we should want as many users as possible to read
and know about it. Why? Because that increases their trust in GNOME as
an application platform. The number of available applications (and the
total number of users) is the only objective reason to start using a
GNOME desktop.

Thus, it's too important to put it into some developer section that
many people wouldn't read.

The core problem is self-description: For example, many users at home
administrate the familiy PC but they wouldn't think of themselves as
"Admins". Thus, they probably ignored the Admin section of the 2.14
release notes and missed useful information about the Lockdown editor.

So I ignored the "user/admin" distinction and moved the developer stuff
under the headline "Code cleanups and backend improvements" which
doesn't sound so scary:

http://www.gnome.org/start/2.16/notes/en/rnbackend.html

In hindsight, "Security and backend improvements." might have
been even better. Well...


Regards,
Claus
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With all that out of the way. We can more on to the more interesting task of actually producing these notes. Again I am new here (an amateur if you prefer), so any suggestions would be handy.

What needs to be done? Claus, you seem to have a good head on your shoulders and all the answer to how things are done, so I'm hoping you can help me here.

-Gervais