Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: GMN (was: Re: Projects and subproject status)

[Chris Gianelloni]

On Fri, 2008-01-11 at 11:30 +0530, Anant Narayanan wrote:
> Thanks Chris. I just went through the Gentoo Weekly News guide (which
> is a little outdated, but still quite helpful). Are there any other
> scripts other than glsa2gwn.py and bugs2gwn.py that need to be run?

Yeah, there's other scripts.  If you check gentoo/src/gwn, you'll find
them all.  Basically, you need get_glsas.py (which needs glsa2gwn.py)
which you run against the last GWN and it gives you all GLSA since.  Of
course, you'll have to modify the first one manually, since it'll give
you everything since October 15th.  Speaking of which, it might be a
good idea for us to put out at least one "stats-only" GWN with all of
the stats since October 15th until the newest edition (whenever that may
be).  Taking Robin's output for the adds/removes, you feed the file to
gwn_adds_removes.py which does all the good stuff like formatting and
pulling dev names automatically.  The gwn_bugzilla_report_en.py pulls
the bugzilla stats.  If you run it on its own, it'll give you the stats
for the last week, starting from the previous day.  It also accepts a
date range so you can specify the dates.  If we switch to a monthly
newsletter, it would probably be best to change it to simply pull all
the stats for a given month (like December).

Ryan's "last rites" stuff was always properly formatted, so a simple
paste is all you need there.  It would be nice to get Robin's
adds/removes to be processed automatically through gwn_adds_removes.py
and sent to gwn-feedback already formatted.

That covers the stats.  Aside from that, there is the gwn_to_text.sh and
gwn2txt.xsl, which does the XML -> text conversion for emailing.
Something that I always wanted was something in the XSL which would
allow us to mark a GWN as "published" and disallow further changes.
Basically, you would do something like put in a <published> tag (or
whatever) and a few things would happen:

#1 - That GWN would no longer be editable.  This is actually a good
thing, as changes after publishing has been something that's bitten us a
few times, especially given the nature of the emailed editions of the
GWN.  Rather than change the GWN after it is published, I planned on
doing a "Corrections" type section where we would list any mistakes
(worth mentioning, not typos and such) in the previous GWN.

#2 - That GWN gets automatically converted to plain text via a
post-commit hook and automatically emailed to the GWN list.

#3 - That GWN is published to the front page.  How this would be done is
still something up in the air.  Perhaps adding a <summary> tag which
would allow you to set the summary, which would show up on the front
page, in the GWN itself, even if it is never displayed directly in the
GWN edition.

The idea is to take all of the steps which could be easily automated and
do so, saving the GWN editor a lot of time doing manual/menial copy and
pasting.

> I'll try and co-ordinate with infra to get them running automatically
> on a monthly basis. Is there anything else I need to know?
>
> A few points:
>
> 1) I'm going to create a sub-project called 'GMN' under the PR
> project, which will supersede the GWN project.

That sounds like a good idea.

> 2) I'm planning to get the first issue out by 21st of this month, and
> subsequently on the third monday of every month.

Are you planning on having the 21st edition show stats for December,
or... ?

> 3) Can we have email aliases gmn@g.o and gmn-admin@g.o
> for purposes of this project? (It sounds silly to ask for feedback on
> the GMN at gwn-feedback@g.o)

Sounds good to me.  What is the purpose of 2 aliases, though?  We found
that people had enough problems with only one email to send to, so I'm
just curious what your thinking is here.

> 4) Can we 'move' the gentoo-gwn mailing list to gentoo-gmn?

Definitely.

> @Christian, William and Ryan:
> Please do resume sending your articles as soon as I get the gmn email
> alias setup. I'll get in touch with you shortly after the necessary
> arrangements have been made.

Let me know once the alias is up and I'll forward along all of the stuff
people have submitted since October.  Whether you use it all (or none of
it) at least you'll have it.

> Any suggestions/tips/comments on the new venture, are of course, more
> than welcome.

Feel free to ask me any questions that you have along the way.  I tried
to make publishing the GWN easier, but I still didn't get nearly as much
accomplished as I had wished.

-- 
Chris Gianelloni
Release Engineering Strategic Lead
Games Developer