This page is about times.debian.net - currently a service in preparation.

It is related to something like dot.kde.org, and should contain all the nice small items that are too unimportant for debian-news@lists.debian.org, but still are important enough that we should like to speak about it. One of the key items is that more people should have the right to add articles there.

All on this page is just a first draft, feel free to change it.

User Interface

From the user's point of view, it is basically "just another rss page". Articles on ?DebianTimes should be categorized, and users can decide which categories they want to see.

For the "end users" there are two "simple" interfaces: A rss-style one (or rather many), and a standard html-style one.

For the html-front end, users should see the "current" articles (10?) on the front page, and be able to scroll back in history to older months. [Q: Also scroll back to "older" pages on the standard page, or only per month?]

The rss-style page includes the most recent 30 [Q: right number?] entries. [Q: also scroll back in rss-style]

Both html and rss pages are "configureable" re which tags are ok/not ok.

Articles are shown as http://times.debian.net/123-etch-relased.html, but the server ignores anything after the first -, so that users see what the article is about without forcing complex article handling on the server side.

[Q: Syntax for tags? Only "all but not marked this and that" and "none but only marked so and so"? Or more (complex)?]

Categories

• weekly-news (via rss-syndication)
• news [should the "normal" news be syndicated and be put in a different category?]
• security-announce (via rss-syndication)
• events announcements
• event-reports
• success-stories
• derivatives
• release-related
• regional categories: europe, america, asia, [what for .au+.nz?] [split ca/us vs latin-america?]

[add some more?]

[any reasonable ones via rss-syndication, like people-behind-debian]

Submitter

Articles can be submitted via two ways: Per signed mail, and by an http-interface. This allows the submitter to work the way he prefers to work, and the server to numerate the articles.

Articles contain meta-information, on the mail way via Pseudo-Headers. These information includes Tags, Subject, Short Subject (for the article name), Language and, if appropriate, publication date; articles not containing a publication date are published right now.

The body itself is written in some wiki-style enriched text [FIXME: which one?].

The articles are put by the system in some rcs (svn?), translation is put in the same file in the other languages article. [Q: Other things? Translation is not top-priority anyways] Fixes to the article can also be commited via the rcs-interface. [Q: Update the public date header on fixes? Mark the article somehow?]

Backend

[not decided yet]

Some nice items for the backend (might?) include:

• needs to be driven from svn/... for regular updates
• import rss from other sides, like dwn, security?

The rcs checkout is updated. A (fast) index of important stuff exists. A "last changed"-time is put somewhere on the file system.

When a client requests some page (i.e. a special combination of tags), it is looked up whether this combination is already cached and at least as current as the last change. If so -> deliver.

Otherwise, the page is created by parsing the index and - if required - the relevant articles. Code from planet.debian can be take to do this without too much effort. The page is stored, and, if there are too many stored pages (remember, with 10 tags we can have 3^10 pages (or so, depending on which combinations we allow), which are really many different pages), some old non-standard ones are removed (non-standard means: not with all tags enabled, and probably something like "everything except dwn").

The index should contain information about name of the article, date, tags, url, so that it's enough to generate overview pages.