This page documents the current workflow used to draft, edit and send out issues of the Debian Project News.
Please note, that the following states only the ideal workflow. Because of some constraints of the editors or due to expected events (e.g. when one ftp-master ask the issue to be delayed for a couple of hours, so the mail he is about to send out can be mentioned in the issue) the following timeline might be stretched.
Current workflow
(As practised more or less by Alexander.)
After every release svn.alioth.debian.org/svn/publicity/dpn/en/current is moved to the proper location (e.g. 2010/01). Then a new current folder is created and the index.wml-template is copied in there, to start with an empty and fresh news.
Contributors can now add news to the issue in the current folder:
- Interesting blog posts are added.
- Links to interesting discussion on one of our mailing lists are added.
- If a security advisory is released, we consider adding it, roughly based on importance of package and guessed number of installations.
Please see HowToContribute on how to do that.
- Every (second??) Friday (before the Monday when the issue is to be released), the remaining texts in the templates are written:
- New and noteworthy packages are added.
- The Numbers from the WNPP reports are filled in.
- Release Critical Bug statistics are filled in.
Contributors to this issue are added to the last line (in the Editor field of #use wml::debian::projectnews::footer and to the list of copyright holders on the top.
- The Numbering of the Paragraphs is checked, to ensure that RSS feeds will work properly.
- At this point the issue is frozen to give translators time to catch up (and native speakers to fix the remaining errors).
- Request review at debian-l10n-english?
Ask on DWN translation project / wherever for translations?
- On the next Monday (most likely short after lunch brack), the issue is released:
- The issue is added to Debian's website repository (Monday morning)
- Once the website has been rebuild (most likely about noon), it's also available as RSS
After the lunchbreak Alexander sends the mail version to the debian-news mailing list (and translators can follow with their mailing lists)
Problems with the current workflow
http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/newpkg only lists packages for the last seven days, while the DPN are send out every 14 days
Note that while the missing information is not exposed, it is available. Patches to expose it (e.g. by adding an additional parameter) are welcome. Pointers on where to start on request -- ?FrankLichtenheld
Will do so, as my time permits; for now solved with 00 12 * * 1 /home/alex/bin/newpkgs |sed -e "s/ ([1-7] days old)//" | mail -s "New package report" alexander@schmehl.info in my crontab
- ...
See also: