Hi Ingrid,
+1
I would also preferr an additional explicit WhatsNewInformation Text
field in the FeatureMail Information instead of the current handling of
relying on being able to extract the first paragraph from the
specification. In the past sometimes even the official template was
changed in a way that broke the process and it´s probably easy to forget
that only the first paragraph of the abstract goes into the WhatsNew
Information of the release notes. Also there seems to be quite some
inconsistency about handling specifications and new features: some
i-teams write an additional new specification when changing something
existing with only the change being specified in the new spec which fits
with the current handling and some do just update already existing and
already implemented specifications with new stuff which doesn´t fit the
current handling well as you have said.
If others agree to such a change I would like to implement something
like that extra section within the Feature Mail as you have suggested
with some kind of fallback to the old handling if the new field in the
EIS FeatureMail Information is not being set.
So what do others think?
Kind regards,
Bernd Eilers
Ingrid Halama wrote:
Hi Bernd,
On 10/13/09 18:07, Bernd Eilers wrote:
Hi there!
Just a quick reminder to specification writers:
Specification documents are parsed for creating "WhatsNew" information
included into ReleaseNotes HTML pages where some content from the
specifications is being extracted for the ReleaseNotes of
OOo-DeveloperSnapshots and OOo-Releases.
Please make sure that your specification is suitable for this process.
Start by using official templates for specification documents or
specification wiki page.
Further make sure to have a first paragraph in the abstract section of
your specification that would be suitable as the text for the WhatsNew
Information of ReleaseNotes. Especially do not start your abstract
with text like "This specification is about" or similar text which
would not be suitable for being included into the WhatsNew Information
of the ReleaseNotes for a OOo-Release or OOo-DeveloperSnapShot.
I have changed several specifications now and I think this process is
suboptimal.
The abstract has to serve two different purposes that not always fit
together. One purpose is the overview about the specification. The other
purpose is the WhatsNew-Info. For a new feature with an own new
specification this might be quite ok, but several specifications do
evolve as features are added. So they might describe more than one
feature. Furthermore some features are spread over more than one
specification.
Checking the specifications with the mentioned checking process did take
me some additional time and even though I have used the template there
were several errors. There are still errors left and I have no idea how
to fix them. The parsing seems to be very error prone (maybe this is
caused by the problems you mention below).
But the worst at this process is that it is so easy to forget about.
Couldn't we instead introduce an extra section within the Feature Mail?
This would be so simple, self describing, self reminding, easy to use
and easy to parse.
Thanks for the reminder for the current process!
Ingrid
You can than also check if your document or wiki page can still be
parsed correctly for this process or wether on the contrary you might
have corrupted the template with changes being incompatible to the
parsing by using the Misc/CheckSpecification Menu Entry in EIS.
Further make sure to have a correct link to the specification included
when posting feature mails for your new features from within EIS.
This reminder is being posted because the process is currently
somewhat broken, manual reediting is being needed and some valuable
information might be misssing in ReleaseNotes because of incompatible
specification documents.
Kind regards,
Bernd Eilers
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