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Re: Debian project news



[CCing you since I presume you are not subscribed]

On Tue, Mar 23, 2010 at 5:01 AM, Peter Hombach <p.hombach@osorno.ca> wrote:

> Over the past years, I have seen the decline of Debian Project News (DPN).
> Initially being Debian Weekly News (DWN), it deteriorated into Debian
> Quarterly News, without ever changing the name to it, and then to DPN, which
> is now published less than once per year. I hope that this regrettable
> decline is not indicative of the fate of Debian.

Most of the folks associated with Debian are developers and as such
probably not as skilled at preparing newsletters as they could be. In
addition there is always one more bug to fix, which limits the amount
of time people have for news. DPN/DWN were always edited by relatively
few people (usually one or two).

> I have often considered contributing to DWN / DPN, but when I click now on
> the "contribute" link on the DPN page, I get to the DWN contribution page,
> because nobody of the Debian team even bothered with updating that page to
> reflect changes in the Debian project that were made during the last two
> years.

Where do you find that link? http://wiki.debian.org/ProjectNews points
to http://wiki.debian.org/ProjectNews/HowToContribute

 If it is on the wiki, please register an account and fix it. If not,
please file a bug/patch against www.debian.org to get it fixed by the
website team.

> If it is a lack of volunteers, the Debian project should say so. As it
> stands, and given the appearance, I get a rather negative impression. I
> personally would not like to spend time on trying to ride a dead horse (in
> this case, contributing to project news).

Pretty much any part of Debian (and FLOSS in general) has a need for
more people to volunteer (or otherwise contribute) time. This is
especially true for DPN/DWN and promotion of Debian. A while ago the
press folks called for volunteers and dropped DPN because of lack of
time:

http://lists.debian.org/debian-publicity/2009/04/threads.html#00002

Since then, Ana Guerrero started news.debian.net for small snippets of
Debian related news:

http://lists.debian.org/debian-publicity/2009/09/msg00000.html

If you would like to restart DWN/DPN, that would be great. I get the
impression that doing so eats a vast amount of time so you should be
prepared to commit to that or develop alternative approaches to
gathering news and writing DPN. Recruiting users to read, filter and
summarize IRC, lists, forums, blogs, microblogs might be one option.

-- 
bye,
pabs

http://wiki.debian.org/PaulWise


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