(DO NOT POST TO HACKERNEWS/REDDIT/ETC.) RFC for a Community Newsletter for D: What's New in D Draft #1

[Mike]

On Tuesday, 1 April 2014 at 23:25:07 UTC, Meta wrote:

This is really great!

>
> Most of my time spent writing this was trawling through the 
> newsgroup and Github to find stuff, but I'm hoping that once 
> this gets going, people will email me a lot of the stuff to be 
> included in the newsletter. Dicebot has already offered to let 
> me know about stuff he notices, and I'd really like to get the 
> word out that I'm looking for interesting/noteworthy 
> submissions (I set up a new email for this: 
> Whats.New.in.D at gmail.com).

I think the email will work well, but it might also be nice to 
have a public document that contributors could edit directly.  It 
might save you some cutting/pasting/word-smithing time.  Maybe 
then all you would need to do is perform a final edit.  Wiki or 
Github, mabye? (or maybe not)

>
> You might notice that I went out of my way to avoid any mention 
> of a specific interval for the newsletter. That's because I'm 
> not really sure whether it should be weekly or bi-weekly. I 
> went in thinking that bi-weekly would be best, as to avoid 
> those slow weeks with little newsworthy items, but I ended up 
> having much more than I expect in just the time period from 
> ~March 23-April 1, which suggests to me that a weekly format 
> might be preferable.

If you (us?) can keep it up every week, that would be nice.  But 
if it starts with weekly, beware the commitment and readers' 
expectations.

>
> This raises an issue, however. I'm a university student, and 
> while I'm currently working, I'll be returning to school in the 
> fall. I'm worried that during extremely busy weeks, as well as 
> during midterms and exams, I won't have the time to get 
> everything in order. The only solution I can think of is to 
> have a couple of people who would be willing to release the 
> issue if I'm unable to for whatever reason. I expect this to be 
> a rare occurrence, but it must be accounted for, so if there 
> were just a few people willing to volunteer in case of such a 
> eventuality, I'd be grateful.

Having to do the same thing every week can get old, too.  Again, 
I think some way for the general D public to contribute directly 
would help with this, but I know that has the potential to become 
a management nightmare in itself.


> Obviously none of this is final, and I'm willing to change up 
> most of it if somebody has a better idea. I'm not crazy about 
> having multiple big lists of links (announcements, pull 
> requests, commits), so I'd really appreciate input on that, as 
> well as suggestions for other sections to add/replace.
>

I hate to suggest things I can't do myself, but a stats section 
might be nice.  For example:
x bugs opened
x bugs closed
x pull requests submitted
x pull requests merged
x pull requests closed
x pull request waiting for Walter/Andrei ;-)
etc...

I've seen some talent here in this community make some really 
fantastic tools, and maybe this is something someone could throw 
together easily and just execute once a week.

What are your plans for publication and distribution?

And where will they be stored so one could reminisce in nostalgia?

Thanks for this!
Mike