Thu, 01 Apr 2010

Let's resurrect Debian Weekly News -- again

No, my recent mail to debian-devel-announce about resurrecting our newsletter is not an April fool joke. It is serious.

As some readers of planet.debian.org might wonder, why we still need such an archaic thing as an newsletter send out via e-mail. Well, yes, we have planet, we have news.debian.net. We have developer news and the normal mails sent to the -devel-announce lists. So why do we still need a newsletter?

Well, the answer is easy: To inform people and kind of mark our spot. Believe it or not, but there are still people out there, who don't use all these new Web 2.0 stuff and who prefer to just receive from time to time some news about their favourite project. It's very easy to subscribe to the news mailing list, while there are still people out there, unfamiliar with RSS feeds and the like, and the Project News are available as E-Mail, plain HTML on our website as well as RSS feed.

And I do think, that it still covers things, which you might miss otherwise. For example no one can really monitor all our mailing lists and forums. But from time to time, something interesting happens there. So it would be nice to read about it in the Project News, isn't it?

Another thing that comes to my mind is localisation. The Project News can be easily translated in various languages. Granted, we don't have a debian-news-language list for all languages, but at least the HTML and the RSS version can be translated. And maybe the e-mail can be send to existing debian-user-language lists instead, if the readers of that list don't get bothered by it... Why not?

So, by now I have hopefully convinced you, that the Debian Project News are indeed worth to continue and to survive. And therefore you surely want to know how you can help us ;)

Well, contributing is easy. Easiest way is to send us interesting things happening in the wider Debian Universe to the debian-publicity mailing list. Native English speaker may help us by proofreading our en_DE; non native English speakers can translate the Project News.

Of course you can also edit your own articles (we also have some style guidelines). Debian Developers can commit their changes directly to our subversion repository. If you are not DD, you just need a account on alioth and can join our project. We already have quite some documentation available on how to contribute.

I'm looking forward to read from you on our mailing list... See you there!

postet at 13:37 into [Debian] permanent link

lawsuit coming up?

I don't know how Adrian got to know about the Canonical vs. SPI lawsuit; as DPL and press team decided not to make the details public before tomorrow. But rest assured: All involved parties agreed, that it would be in the best interest of all, to settle things out of court.

postet at 10:24 into [Debian] permanent link