Workflow for the Publicity/Press announcement

This page describe the current workflow and best practices for the creation and release of announcements.

1. Start to write the draft using the template provided in the publicity subversion repository under publicity/announcements/en/template.wml: it contains all the necessary wml tags

2. add your draft to the repository (all DDs have rw access to it) in publicity/announcement/en/$year/ with this namescheme: YYYY-MM-DD-$title.wml (where YYYY-MM-DD is the expected release date, if you've not decided it yet, just add the file under publicity/announcement/en/drafts/ with a simple title as name).

3. at least 2 days before the expected release date, send a mail to debian-publicity@lists.debian.org (adding in CC debian-l10n-english@lists.debian.org and debian-i18n@lists.debian.org) asking for reviews and translations

4. Press and/or webmasters only! on $expected-release-date publish the announcement in the website: you just need to add it to the webwml CVS repository at webwml/english/News/$year with the namescheme YYYYMMDD.wml). Take care also of all the available translations (usually are just french, spanish and german) commiting also them on the appropriate dirs.

4.1 Press and/or webmasters only! For stable/oldstable point releases, english/releases/codename/errata.wml and english/template/debian/release_info.wml need to be updated with the version number of the point release.

5. Press and/or webmasters only! run a partial rebuild of the website:

   ssh wolkenstein.debian.org
   cd /srv/www.debian.org/
   sudo -u debwww ./update-part News

6. now you're ready for creating the mail: the script to create it is the publicity repo under publicity/dpn/scripts/DNhtml2mail.pl Please note that the script is not perfect: a check and a couple of adjustments by hand are usually required (and a patch to improve it, as well!)

7. yay! you can finally send the mail to debian-announce@lists.debian.org (if you have the super-powers to do it) or ask Tolimar, MadameZou, pabs or taffit to do it for you!