28 Nov
2012
28 Nov
'12
1:07 a.m.
On 11/27/2012 04:28 PM, Vincent Massol wrote:
The summary is already in the release notes...
What kind of summary takes up 16 pages? That's how long is the PDF for
the 4.3 release notes.
Great thanks!
-Vincent
--
Sergiu Dumitriu
http://purl.org/net/sergiu
Hi Sergiu,
On Nov 27, 2012, at 10:01 PM, Sergiu Dumitriu <sergiu(a)xwiki.org> wrote:
Again, this is not about tweeter. PURLs aren't about length, they're
about finding something in a reliable place, and involve maintenance
work. There should be no broken PURL. I created a few other PURLs a long
time ago, like purl.org/xwiki/repo/, purl.org/xwiki/ml/ and
purl.org/xwiki/ml/archive, purl.org/xwiki/ci/ (which used to point to
hudson).
On 11/27/2012 09:18 AM, Vincent Massol wrote:
You don't need PURL for that…. As i mentioned the tweet clients already shorten URLs…
Check my tweet, you'll see it's not 71 chars long:
https://twitter.com/xwikiorg/status/273180659521028096 (I didn't do anything specific
to shorten the URL). Hi devs,
Here are some notes I took while releasing XWiki 4.3 on how to improve the release
process:
* We need to automate the generation of the CLIRR report. This is what takes the longest
when releasing (not overall time but manual time required). IMO this can be done
relatively easily by creating a patch for the CLIRR maven plugin itself to:
** Add support for wildcards in the new <difference> syntax
** Ensure that their report generation takes into account the <justification>
element
** Possibly add a text report generation that we'll be able to copy paste in our RN
+1.
* Remove PURL generation for Tweets
** Tweets are ephemeral so no need to have permanent URLs
** Tweet clients already do URL shortening
(It's complex to use the PURL UI too)
-1. The PURL is not just about twits, it's about having some permanent
links to our release notes. I really don't like that our URLs are so
damn long
(http://www.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/ReleaseNotes/ReleaseNotesXWiki44RC1
is 71 chars long), so I like to have something shorter. So far I seem
to be the only one that sees the value of PURLs, so if you
think that we don't want to maintain them in general (not just because
tweets are ephemeral), we could do that.
They could have value in other places than tweets but then we don't do this for a lot
more things like install documentation, download page, etc and those are way more
important than release notes which are also very ephemeral. So my take is to drop them for
release notes links.
Why do you need to use the purl.org UI? The
push-release script is
supposed to handle that automatically.
Check the documentation at
http://dev.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/ReleasePlans/ReleasePlanHelp#HAnnounceo…
It says not to use it.
* Don't create RN summary for OW2, email and
even blog post. This will win some more time. Instead just link to the RN page which
contains a summary and all details.
I'm kind of -1 for this as well. The summary is for lazy or busy people
that don't have time to read our lengthy release notes. Not even our own
devs (and the rest of the XWiki SAS employees) have time to read them
fully. A very quick summary that takes 30 seconds to read is a good
thing, at least a few more people will find the time to read those and
notice how XWiki evolves.
The release notes ARE are summary. We take a lot of pain to make them nice looking and
readable. Having a one line sentence about the release is
detrimental IMO (and more time consuming for us when doing the release).
Time consuming? Such a summary is already present at the top of the
release notes; worst case, if the RM is lazy enough, he can just copy it
from there.
We want people to click on the link and get to the
release notes page.
"We want to *force* people to click on that link and spend several
minutes to read our nice release notes."
It's never a good idea to force people to do things, even if its for
their own good. You're hoping that the result will be "more readers of
the release notes", but the more likely outcome is the opposite. Only
people that are really interested in finding out what's new will
actually come and read the full release notes, and they will do that
regardless of whether a short summary is present in the email, tweet,
OW2 or FreeCode announcement or whatever.
I see two main benefits in a summary:
- readers will at least glance over the very short summary and have some
idea about what's going on
- some readers will find something that will catch their interest and
will want to find out more details, thus they'll open the release notes
We might even get new users if there's an interesting item in there.
Believing that everybody will want to read the full release notes is
wishful thinking.
I speak from my own experience. I only read the full release notes for
projects that are important for us and that I have some experience with:
Velocity and FOP. For everything else, I just read the announcement
emails or summaries published on LWN or The H.
So, the summary is not for people that are really attached to XWiki,
it's for casual news readers that might see the XWiki announcements
among other news.
For example for the email it could be:
"
The XWiki development team is proud to announce the availability of XWiki Enterprise
<version>.
You can download it here: http://www.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Main/Download
Make sure to review the release notes:
http://www.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/ReleaseNotes/ReleaseNotesXWiki<short version>
Thanks
-The XWiki dev team
"
* Put maven.xwiki.org:~/xwiki-release-scripts under Git and do a git reset before the ow2
step to be sure to have clean scripts
I wanted to do that but git was not installed on the machine at that
time. I see that it is now.
[Some time later]
I did this, committed the only changes that were present there. It's a
read-only clone, so committing won't work directly from the machine
unless extra steps are taken. > WDYT?
>
> Thanks
> -Vincent