CfH: Some issues regarding the lenny release notes

["W. Martin Borgert" <debacle@debian.org>]

Hi,

I like to ask for opinions/help/contribution regarding the lenny
release notes:

0. credits
1. too many bug reports open, missing tests, deadlines
2. hyphenation with dblatex
3. size of PDFs with xmlroff on etch
4. compilation time with dblatex on etch

0. Credits

   I added some author and translator names to the file
   en/release-notes.dbk. If your name or the name of your
   favourite contributor is not yet in, please just patch the
   file. If the existing information is inaccurate, patch it.
   Maybe we can also remove some names, which do not apply to
   the current state anymore.

1. Too many bug reports open, missing tests, deadlines

   There are a lot of open bug reports against the release
   notes, with moreinfo and help tags set. It would be cool,
   if some people would help to close them. We also need to
   do etch2lenny upgrades and fresh installs using the release
   notes to find errors and omissions in the document.

   Which leads to the question of final deadlines: How about
   setting the deadline for English to Sunday, 2009-02-08 23:59
   UTC, for translations to Thursday, 2009-02-12 23:59 UTC? This
   would leave one day until the planned release.

   (Note, that some obsolete parts are marked "fixme". Don't
   worry: Everything marked "fixme" will automatically left out,
   when unsetting "draft" in the Makefile. I hope.)

2. Hyphenation with dblatex

   Jan Hauke pointet out (#513529), that some English words,
   such as "aptitude", should not be hyphenated in (e.g.)
   German, or at least not like common German words. For all
   dblatex languages, I added a hyphenation.tex file to the
   respective directories. If you find bad hyphenation in the
   release notes, try adding the correct hyphenation to this
   file. I hope, that this will work. If you have a better
   (= cleaner) solution to the problem, please let me now.
   (I don't know anything about hyphenation with xmlroff, btw.)

3. Size of PDFs with xmlroff on etch

   When you build the lenny release notes on etch, even with
   the xmlroff backport from lenny, I got Huge PDFs for some
   languages. I assume, that we need a backport of libcairo2 to
   get reasonable sized PDFs or just build on a lenny machine.
   The PDF for ml is 69× bigger when build on etch, zh_CN still
   6.7× bigger! We need to fix this or change the Makefile:

   -DISABLED_PDF=
   +DISABLED_PDF=cs ja ml pl ro ru vi zh_CN zh_TW

   Anybody up for libcairo2 backport to etch?

4. Compilation time with dblatex on etch

   When you build the lenny release notes on etch, even with
   the dblatex backport from lenny, I experienced that it
   compiles 6.5× times slower than the same version on lenny.
   Is it my broken etch setup? Is it the older Python? Another
   reason to build on lenny, if it were possible...

Cheers!