Lack of FreeBSD coverage in the UK media

[Robert Watson]

On Wed, 4 Apr 2007, Ivan Voras wrote:

> Robert Watson wrote:
>
>> Some things that might be neat to see articles about in the next six months 
>> as 7.0 approaches:
>
> I've had quite a few hits on my little summary "what's cooking for 7.0" 
> page, so I concurr the people are interested.
>
> I suggest to make an official section on the www.freebsd.org web which will 
> host these kind of articles. Sort of tied into the release system, so in 
> addition to the usual "Release notes", "Errata", "Supported platforms" and 
> other documents, each .0 version would have a "Highlights" section (one or, 
> preferebly, more pages) with a high-level to mid-level description of the 
> new (non arch-specific) features, presented as "selling points" for the 
> whole RELENG branch.
>
> I know that there's a short paragraph or two about new features in the 
> release notes currently, and I think this should stay, but I really think 
> there's a need for longer articles hosted on the official (i.e. not on 
> third-party) web site.
>
> If this passes in some form, I volunteer to write about the storage-oriented 
> things such as gjournal, ZFS & similar.

I agree.  The release notes are a great technical reference, but they are 
hardly marketing pieces.  It would be good to see media- and human-friendly 
articles highlighting the new features in a release (and their importance), as 
well as articles on specific topics.  The same thing is true of the status 
reports vs. commits, btw: sometimes making a list sorted by interest as 
opposed to by integration date is important. :-)

Robert N M Watson
Computer Laboratory
University of Cambridge