Newsletter Overview
From FrugalWiki
Contents |
NOTE
Since this page was written, several additions have been made to the newsletter's structure. These are yet to be documented in this page.
About
The aim of this documentation is to describe the purpose of the Frugalware newsletter, also how to maintain it. It's aimed at those who simply want to know more about the newsletter and anyone who is involved or wants to get involved in its maintenance. It was written by the newsletter's current author - phayz - so that someone who has no prior knowledge of the newsletter could take on the role of author, whether temporarily or permanently. The newsletter is certainly not perfect but anyone who wants to change it should first read this document in full.
History
The Frugalware newsletter was created by developer AlexExtreme, with the goal of informing Frugalware's users about events and changes which were relevant to them. After issue FIXME, AlexExtreme left the Frugalware development team for personal reasons. A few months later, Frugalware user phayz took up the role of Frugalware newsletter maintainer, with the same basic goal.
Purpose
The Frugalware newsletter's basic goal is to inform and educate Frugalware's users about events and changes which might be relevant to them. The hope is that better informed users will be more actively involved in the distribution's activities. They're more likely to be satisfied with changes if they understand the reasons for those changes. Regarding events, it's important to celebrate milestones in a project's life. Milestones such as new releases are a good opportunity to highlight the progress being made. It's important to plan for the future but equally important to reflect on the progress already made. When individuals have done something special, the newsletter is a good method of thanking those people and telling everyone of their good work. It's important that this includes everyone, whether they're inside or outside the Frugalware team.
Language
The original copy of the newsletter is written in English since it's the International language. The English used should be as simple as possible, without treating its readers as idiots. The newsletter's current author is Australian, so the English spelling used is Australian English. Where newsletter content comes from other sources - e.g. pacman-g2's database or an interview - the English used is not translated into Australian English.
General guidelines
As far as possible, the newsletter's content is not to be offensive to anyone, any gender, any religion, another project, or another distribution etc. If offense is caused, an immediate apology should be made and published on the Frugalware website (unless the offended person or group says otherwise). If you're not sure if something is likely to be offensive, ask the development team, or some of its members for advice. To help make the newsletter more interesting and (hopefully) funny to read, the current usually has at least one joke per issue. This is usually an item in the "Events etc" section since it doesn't suit to do this in other areas of the newsletter. Sometimes these jokes are about members of the Frugalware team. If you're not sure if they would approve of the joke, it's best to ask before publishing. The option of including these jokes is solely the personal preference of the newsletter's current author. They may not be included if a future author or co-author decided not to include them. So far though, the reaction to these has been positive and they will continue for the moment.
The purpose of the newsletter is to inform, educate and entertain its readers. It's not a means of communicating the personal views of its author(s). A personal blog is the best place for expressing your personal opinion.
Structure
The newsletter doesn't have a rigid structure. In general the sections are laid out so that the most interesting content is at the top and the least interesting content at the bottom. News of events and other items are at the very start. In the middle are the informative and educational sections. At the end are sections such as Bugs and Security. At the very end is a section which tells the reader who produces and translates the newsletter. The aim of the newsletter's overall structure is to produce a document which can be read "standalone".
Content
Anything Frugalware-specific or that's likely to be of interest to Frugalware's users can be included in the newsletter. It's been discussed and agreed with Frugalware's developers that only changes which are complete or nearly complete should be reported in the newsletter. The problem with reporting partially-complete changes is that those changes may later be cancelled, and it looks bad if they're reported and later the work is abandoned.
WELCOME
This section is to introduce the issue to the reader, with highllights of the issue's contents. It's aim is to capture the reader's attention and encourage them to read the entire issue. The items which are highlighted in this section are cut and pasted into another file as part of the publication process. Further details of this are contained in the Production section of this document.
EVENTS ETC
This section's purpose is mainly to highlight events which are likely to be of interest to Frugalware's users. It can also be used to mention anything which doesn't fit into another section, hence the "etc" part of the section's title. Events big and small are included, from new releases to someone's first FrugalBuild contribution. It's important to highlight even relatively small events because they might not be noticed otherwise. When an event occurred on a specific date, that date is usually mentioned in the first part of the news item. For the sake of fairness, it's best not to mention the achievements of the same person or people too often. If the focus is too often on those who have already made contributions, it may discourage new contributors. Unfortunately to gather information on recent events usually requires that the author(s) be regularly reading several Frugalware mailing lists - e.g. FIXME. In some cases it is necessary to contact people to confirm your understanding of the event. Major commits to the main git repository may also deserve mention - e.g. a new kernel release, or new release of GNOME/KDE.
GETTING TO KNOW YOU
The aim of this section is to educate the reader about some small technical aspect of Frugalware. FIXME[The hope is that, with a better understanding, the reader is better able to use Frugalware]. As is mentioned in the section's introduction, it's not meant to replace Frugalware's official documentation. There are two reasons for this: (1) the scope of these items is generally quite narrow, so they don't cover the topic in detail; (2) the newsletter's current author (phayz) doesn't have a highly technical knowledge of all aspects of Frugalware, so very technical details can't be covered in the newsletter. At the time this document was written, almost all topics within the author's field of knowledge have been covered. This section may no longer appear in the newsletter, or may start repeating previous material. A decision on this hasn't yet been made and will be made with the help of the development team. Since this section first appeared in the newsletter, it's become obvious that it should have a better title. A more accurate title might have been "Getting to know Frugalware", since that's what it's about.
ABOUT THE NEWSLETTER
This is intended to be the last section of the newsletter. Included is recognition that while the newsletter is the result of its author(s)' work, all credit for the Frugalware distribution is due to the development team. Mention is also made that the newsletter is translated into French and Danish. It is important that this is mentioned because some readers may not be aware of this. The translated issues are hosted by their respective communities, so it's not immediately obvious that they're available.
FOCUS ON PACKAGE(S)
The purpose of this section is to make readers aware of packages or applications that they might otherwise not have found. It's to introduce the reader to the application's purpose and features, especially any which are not obvious and especially useful. All packages may be included, although so far the focus has been on packages that the user interacts with directly. Since Frugalware is desktop agnostic, this section is to be the same although this is difficult to achieve. The newsletter's current author is a regular user of GNOME, so knowledge of other desktop environments, or window managers, is not as good as it could be. There are many applications which are know to Linux users, so this section tries to focus on lesser-known applications. As far as possible, the mix of GUI and CLI applications is to be about equal. These items are meant only to be an introduction, not a full review.
SECURITY FIXES
The purpose of this section is to list those security fixes which have been released since the previous newsletter issue. Security fixes are available *only* for the latest Frugalware release, so this list is usually quite short. Aside from the version control commit messages, no announcement is made of security fixes as they're applied to packages. Since this section was introduced, there has been only one change - the details of security fixes are presented in tabular format. Details such as where the security fixes' information comes from and how they're presented are contained in the Presentation section of this document.
BUGS STATUS
The purpose of this section is to provide a statistical summary of activity in the Frugalware Bug Tracker System (BTS). Since the BTS entries are either bus reports or feature requests, the statistics are broken down into these two types. Statistics are further broken down into tasks opened and closed since the previous newsletter issue. The reason for showing opened and closed statistics is to demonstrate to readers that activity in the BTS is occurring. It is particularly important that readers see bug reports being closed since it confirms that action is being taken on bugs. Since people have confidence that bug reports will be actioned, they're more likely to report them. Details of the source of the statistics and how they're presented are contained in the Presentation section of this document.
NEW PACKAGES
The purpose of this section is to list new packages which are likely to be of interest to the reader. It is similar to the Focus on Packages section but it lists only basic details of each package. It may be possible to combine these sections but the newsletter's current author doesn't have enough time to provide details of every new package. This situation may improve in the future.
HINTS AND TIPS
The purpose of this section is to provide the reader with snippets of information that are likely to be useful. They may be a method of completing a common task more quickly or efficiently, perhaps a combination of CLI commands. These hints and tips may be Frugalware specific or applicable to all Linux distributions. Anything which is likely to make the reader's computing activities easier is welcome. While it would be ideal to include only original work, sometimes it is desireable to include work from external sources (i.e. outside the Frugalware community). Hints or tips from external sources may be included in this section, provided (1) the material's licence allows it to be included, and (2) that proper attribution is given, so that readers know its source. Hints and tips from Frugalware's users are especially welcome, again with proper attribution. As is the case with the Focus on Packages section, this section's scope is limited by the knowledge of the newsletter's current author. Although this section has a disclaimer at it's start, only hints and tips which the author knows are correct should be included. Readers would reasonably expect that hints and tips published shouldn't harm their systems.
FRUGALWARE'S DEVELOPERS/ARTISTS/CONTRIBUTORS ARE PEOPLE TOO!
This section was inspired by the KDE community's profiles of its own developers, artists and contributors. The purpose of this section is to show that those people who contribute to Frugalware are people just like all other Frugalware's users. They have their own reasons for their contributions, their own interests outside Frugalware, etc. The hope is that readers realise there is very little difference between themselves and Frugalware's current team members. This may encourage them to also become contributors. The list of questions depends upon the person being interviewed. They start with introductory questions and then go into more detail. Interviewees are given the option of deleting, adding or amending questions to suit themselves. The developer's interview is for those who contribute FrugalBuilds or code in other forms. The artist's interview is for those who contribute artwork. The contributor's interview is for anyone who doesn't fit into the previous categories, including those who provide translations, documentation etc. The purpose for having different types of interviews is not because one contribution is valued more highly than another but because there's no one set of questions to suit all situations.
FLOSS DEVELOPERS ARE PEOPLE TOO!
This section is very similar to the "Frugalware developers...are people too!" section. Just like that section, the intent is to demonstrate to readers that FLOSS developers are just like themselves in many respects. Production The production process of the newsletter consists of the following stages: 1. content creation; 2. pre-publication tests; 3. publication.
Content Creation
The process begins with copying the blank newsletter template. Those sections which won't be used in a specific issue can be deleted. If your editor has a file template function, it can be useful for this step. The template can be found here - FIXME. Those sections which consist of creative writing of course don't have any specific rules or format. For the sake of continuity though, formatting should be consistent with previous issue's formatting. One area which definitely needs improvement is the lack of use of CSS in the newsa are letter's formatting. Contributions in this are welcome.
Bugs Status
This section consists of some standard text with the dates changed accordingly, followed by a table. The statistics contained in the table are produced by a (crude) BASH script and these are cut-and-pasted into the table. Note that the BASH script needs to be edited for each newsletter issue, with the dates being changed to the date of the previous issue. It's certainly not the most efficient method and is yet another area that needs improvement.
Security Fixes
This section consists of some standard text, followed by a table. Sometimes there will have been no security fixes released since the previous issue, so instead of a table the word "None" should appear. If there have been security releases, the table is produced by a PHP script. The script extracts select fields from an XML file named "security.xml" and rewrites these into a table. The only prerequisite to running the script is that the homepage-ng git repository must be up to date, because this is where the security.xml file is stored. The script can be found here - FIXME.
New Packages
This section consists of some standard text, followed by a table. The table is created manually. To get a list of those packages which have been created since the previous issue consists of grep-ing git's output. The command is "git log --since=FIXME | grep -B 5 "new package"> From this list you can pick and choose which packages will feature in this section.