cvs commit: www/share/sgml news.xml

[Edwin Groothuis]

On Tue, Jun 26, 2007 at 10:09:57PM +0200, Christian Brueffer wrote:
> On Tue, Jun 26, 2007 at 09:59:37PM +0200, Simon L. Nielsen wrote:
> > On 2007.06.25 11:47:03 +0000, Edwin Groothuis wrote:
> > > edwin       2007-06-25 11:47:03 UTC
> > > 
> > >   FreeBSD doc repository (src,ports committer)
> > > 
> > >   Modified files:
> > >     share/sgml           news.xml 
> > >   Log:
> > >   Announce my src commit bit
> > 
> > I raised this before, but do anyone really see any value in this kind
> > of news entries?  I mean, why would users care?  It's marginally
> > interesting for committers, but interested committers already read the
> > access commits..

Recently (about a month ago), xorg 7.2 was imported in the ports
framework. This was a very big change. Everybody was talking about
it. On -ports, and a little bit on -questions.

It didn't show up on the FreeBSD news column. And neither on the
RSS feed. I doubt that anybody outside the -ports mailinglist knew
about it, except when they were trying to upgrade a port and ran
into strange error messages :-)

After five days of waiting for somebody with authority (portmgr?
flz@? A docs-commitor? Anybody but me who didn't even manage to get
his machine up to date for a test run) to post it there, I realized
it was never going to be posted on the frontpage and I submitted a
news item.

The fact that FreeBSD upgraded to Xorg 7.2 got its eyeballs, flz@
got his credits and people all over the world knew that FreeBSD
wasn't dead yet.

> > This is not specific to this particular commit, but all the upgrade
> > privileges news entries.
> 
> I concur.  That's exactly the reason I didn't announce my src bit
> addition back then.

When I got the stock email from -core about my approval, it said
"announce it". I thought "been there, done that.". I saw somebody
else posting his upgrade, and thought "been there, will do it
again.". Got some kuddos from old friends who don't use FreeBSD but
saw my name on a website facilitating the FreeBSD RSS feed.


The news items and RSS feed do work: We got eyeballs.


I'll leave the descission about the policy with regarding to
enhancement announces to others.

Edwin

-- 
Edwin Groothuis      |            Personal website: http://www.mavetju.org
edwin at mavetju.org    |              Weblog: http://www.mavetju.org/weblog/