On Tuesday, 1 April 2014 at 23:25:07 UTC, Meta wrote:
Thanks to an unexpected free afternoon due to a brutal spring
blizzard, and large amount of caffeine, I've come up with an
initial draft of a D newsletter. It's tentatively named "What's
New in D", and it's purpose is to aggregate the important
community news in one place, as well as to give D some
well-deserved publicity.
As I said, this is an initial rough draft to show how I
envision the basic format. The end product, of course, will not
be hosted on Google Docs... I've been considering using GitHub
Pages to host it, but if anyone has a better suggestion, please
let me know. I think it would be really neat to write these
newsletters in DDOC, but I know barely anything about DDOC.
The current format is somewhat similar to This Week in Rust. A
little opening blurb, followed by a paragraph detailing any
recent articles, followed by a couple of the big announcements,
which each get a whole paragraph to themselves, followed by a
list of one-line smaller announcements. Next is Community
Overview, with another short introductory paragraph, and a
couple of paragraphs detailing interesting discussions from the
newsgroup.
After that is a list of new pull requests and commits to
master. This is the section that needs the most work; right
now, it's just two bulleted lists of two pulls/commits each,
separated by whether they were made to DMD/Phobos/Druntime. In
the finished product, these sections will contain all or most
of the recent pulls/commits... which leads me to worry that it
could turn into a space issue. However, if I prune the lists to
include only what I think is interesting, somebody is bound to
get upset (probably rightly so). On the other hand, if I just
randomly pick, some of the good stuff will inevitably get
passed over. I'm not sure how to handle this fairly. Thoughts?
Last is Miscellania. for Adopt a Bug Report and Adopt a Bounty,
I'll choose a random bug report/bounty that people can tackle
(or not). The whole point is to try to mitigate the fact that a
lot of bug reports and/or bounties can go a long time without
any action, and get buried under new stuff coming in. I also
considered Adopt a Pull Request, to let people know about pull
requests sitting around without getting a review. I also
included Music for Hackers as a sort of fun little
afterthought. Thoughts?
Most of my time spent writing this was trawling through the
newsgroup and Github to find stuff, but I'm hoping that once
this gets going, people will email me a lot of the stuff to be
included in the newsletter. Dicebot has already offered to let
me know about stuff he notices, and I'd really like to get the
word out that I'm looking for interesting/noteworthy
submissions (I set up a new email for this:
[email protected]).
You might notice that I went out of my way to avoid any mention
of a specific interval for the newsletter. That's because I'm
not really sure whether it should be weekly or bi-weekly. I
went in thinking that bi-weekly would be best, as to avoid
those slow weeks with little newsworthy items, but I ended up
having much more than I expect in just the time period from
~March 23-April 1, which suggests to me that a weekly format
might be preferable.
This raises an issue, however. I'm a university student, and
while I'm currently working, I'll be returning to school in the
fall. I'm worried that during extremely busy weeks, as well as
during midterms and exams, I won't have the time to get
everything in order. The only solution I can think of is to
have a couple of people who would be willing to release the
issue if I'm unable to for whatever reason. I expect this to be
a rare occurrence, but it must be accounted for, so if there
were just a few people willing to volunteer in case of such a
eventuality, I'd be grateful.
The last thing is licensing, for completeness. Maybe I'm
overthinking this, but why not shore up a potential hole while
it still exists? I think either Boost or GPL would be
serviceable.
Obviously none of this is final, and I'm willing to change up
most of it if somebody has a better idea. I'm not crazy about
having multiple big lists of links (announcements, pull
requests, commits), so I'd really appreciate input on that, as
well as suggestions for other sections to add/replace.
You can view the rought draft here.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Elwm-k6Gs9f7Y-FQNmRVt1uycPEtLkHgpR4v2aQjGwc/edit?usp=sharing
Again, please DO NOT submit this to Hackernews/Reddit, etc., as
it needs a lot more work before it's ready for public
consumption.
DO destroy.
Just an idea, however how would you feel about doing it as a
github repository and that way anybody can edit the next edition.
The only issue I can think of is getting github markdown to be
rendered in e.g. an email. Or at least converted to something
clients can understand.
At worse the issue tracker would be a great way to allow others
to tell you about content ext.
