Re: Debian Newsletter Proposal
On Sun, 10 Aug 1997, Brandon Mitchell wrote:
> I've put together some ideas for the debian newsletter I proposed last
> week.
> 1) This will be a weekly summary of info from debian-user, debian-devel,
I tried to do something like this last spring. I quickly gave up because
it takes a *lot* of hours to read through a week's worth of messages,
decide which threads are worthy to summarize, and then write the
summaries. Also because a good summary, even after cutting out all the
fluff, still ends up being several pages long and thus pushes the limit of
what people are willing to read through.
In case it may be helpful, here's how it worked: the idea sprang out of a
discussion on debian-talk (an unofficial list run by Mark Constable
<markc@motd.com> -- I don't know if it still exists), regarding how all
these great ideas on the lists just get lost because it's impossible to
find that one vital piece of information you need to restore/enhance your
system, the tip you read last month that is now buried somewhere in a
thousand messages and unfindable by the search engines. Anyway, two other
people and I decided to write weekly summaries of important information
gleaned from debian-user and debian-devel. At first I just had one window
open with pine, sorted by subject, and another window with the vi document
I was writing. That led to a python program that would read the messages
in an MH folder and create a blank template listing each subject-thread,
the name/address of the originator, and the number of replies, and a blank
line. Then you just read the messages and write a one or two sentance
summary of the threads you want to keep (above the blank line). I can send
you the program and an archive of the discussion if that would help, since
I don't think any of it got onto debian-user.
Actually, the original idea came from something I saw the year before
that, called Digital Espresso. DE was a web newsletter sponsored by a
company that made weekly summaries of the discussions in comp.lang.java.
I found that to be a very valuable resource -- you just read the summaries
and go back to the originals just for the threads you want to find out
more about. It's a way of surviving the onslaught of so many messages.
However, that zine was supported by a company, and it also no longer
exists.
Around the time I was writing my summaries, the Debian Documentation
Project (debian-doc) came into being. We immediately saw our effort as
really a kind of documentation, and were trying to figure out how to
incorporate it into the rest of the documentation repitoire that the
debian-doc folks were creating. However, since I burned out on writing
summaries, we had no content to offer debain-doc, even if we did come up
with a structure.
Also around that time, Jim Pick <jim@jimpick.com> came up with the idea of
having a debian-tips mailing list and/or web database that would allow
people to contribute their own "this is how I did it" hints. However,
this idea also has never been implemented.
Anyway, good luck with your newsletter. It sounds like you're going a
little more general (reporting only on the major trends in the Debian
world) than I was doing (trying to be a comprehensive FAQ of all our
collective wisdom), which may make the difference in terms of making
something small enough to be manageable. If you can pull it off, it's
definitely something that's needed.
By the way, for trivia's sake: over an eleven day period last March,
there were 728 messages (294 threads). I don't know what the number has
increased to by now. My debian-user MH archive folder, which has been
collecting messages since March 23, has reached 35.3MB (10535 messages),
and my debian-devel folder (since March 14) has gotten up to 30.7MB (8612
messages).
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