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

[Meta]

On Wednesday, 2 April 2014 at 00:25:08 UTC, Mike wrote:
> 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)

I entertained the idea of hosting it on GitHub. This would make 
"moderation" of submissions in the form of pull requests fairly 
simple. The drawback of this, however, is that anyone can see 
each issue long before it is finished, diminishing the "impact" 
of the actual release. Maybe this isn't a huge problem, though.


> 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.

Seeing as I have never maintained something like this before, 
maybe it *would* be best to start out bi-weekly. I do not have a 
clear idea of how much work subsequent issues will take. This is 
more or less unknown territory for me.


> 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.

With a few other volunteers, we could take turns round-robin 
style. It depends on who else wants to volunteer their time, I 
guess. The more I think about having a community-contributed list 
on Github, the more I like it, but that seems to conflict with 
why I'm doing this in the first place, i.e., nobody else wants to 
do it.


> 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...

That is a good idea, but it would be extremely tedious and 
annoying to do by hand.

> 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.

If somebody wants to generate these statistics, I will be more 
than happy to include them.


> What are your plans for publication and distribution?
> And where will they be stored so one could reminisce in 
> nostalgia?

Publication is probably too formal of a word. TWiR does it 
blog-style, hosting it on GitHub pages, and I don't see any 
reason why I shouldn't do the same.