[gentoo-dev] PR Project Activity Issues

[AllenJB]

Hi all,

The Gentoo PR Project currently appears to be having difficulties with 
keeping up, both with the newsletters and announcements, and I believe 
this is currently reflecting badly on the project as a whole. These 
issues are apparently holding back some key changes to the Gentoo 
website to make it easier to navigate and help the project appear more 
active than is reflected by the current front page.

If the project needs more hands, and these aren't appearing, then 
perhaps more should be done to advertise the positions and exactly what 
they entail (I would suggest announcements on the forums, with specifics 
on who to talk to for those interested).

The newsletter has been having issues for some time, and this makes me 
wonder if the amount of effort required is excessive for the value 
obtained from those efforts. While the GuideXML system Gentoo uses for 
newsletters, etc is nice, does it require too much time and effort to 
convert articles to GuideXML and get the newsletters published?

Alternative setups for the newsletter could be to either go text-only or 
web-only.

Text-only would involved producing a text-only email, which is then 
copied and pasted onto the website for archiving. This would obviously 
require minimal formatting work.

My idea for a web-only setup would require more initial work, but I 
think would make maintenance much easier once set up. The Gentoo 
Newsletter would become a separate website, not based on GuideXML, but 
on a standard CMS. Instead of having set release dates (weekly or 
monthly), articles would just be released as soon as they are produced.

The regular features like bug stats, GLSAs, developer changes could be 
easily generated automatically (I suspect almost all of those are mostly 
done automatically anyway - adapting such scripts for a CMS that can 
publish from RSS feeds should be relatively trivial) and would appear on 
the website without any intervention.

As above, articles would be published as and when they are ready. 
Instead of just 1 editor, this website-based setup would be able to have 
multiple editors with little collaboration required (just to mark 
submissions as being worked on when an editor picks them up, which 
should be easily doable using a ticket-based system (bugzilla) or 
mailing list).

An advantage, as I see it, of the website-based system is that it could 
be expanded to include features not currently easily possible with the 
current newsletter - categorized archiving of articles (not just be 
publish date) and user comments. While I haven't looked, it's probably 
possible to even find a CMS which includes email notification of new 
articles as a feature.


AllenJB

PS. This did start out as a submission for a council meeting agenda 
item, but I couldn't stop writing.

PPS. To preempt the obvious suggestion: I do intend to become a 
developer, I just don't feel I have the time to commit right now. 
That'll hopefully change in ~6 months once I've finished uni and have a job.