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

Rikki Cattermole alphaglosined at gmail.com
Tue Apr 1 19:32:10 PDT 2014


On Tuesday, 1 April 2014 at 23:25:07 UTC, Meta wrote:
> Thanks to an unexpected free afternoon due to a brutal spring 
> blizzard, and large amount of caffeine, I've come up with an 
> initial draft of a D newsletter. It's tentatively named "What's 
> New in D", and it's purpose is to aggregate the important 
> community news in one place, as well as to give D some 
> well-deserved publicity.
>
> As I said, this is an initial rough draft to show how I 
> envision the basic format. The end product, of course, will not 
> be hosted on Google Docs... I've been considering using GitHub 
> Pages to host it, but if anyone has a better suggestion, please 
> let me know. I think it would be really neat to write these 
> newsletters in DDOC, but I know barely anything about DDOC.
>
> The current format is somewhat similar to This Week in Rust. A 
> little opening blurb, followed by a paragraph detailing any 
> recent articles, followed by a couple of the big announcements, 
> which each get a whole paragraph to themselves, followed by a 
> list of one-line smaller announcements. Next is Community 
> Overview, with another short introductory paragraph, and a 
> couple of paragraphs detailing interesting discussions from the 
> newsgroup.
>
> After that is a list of new pull requests and commits to 
> master. This is the section that needs the most work; right 
> now, it's just two bulleted lists of two pulls/commits each, 
> separated by whether they were made to DMD/Phobos/Druntime. In 
> the finished product, these sections will contain all or most 
> of the recent pulls/commits... which leads me to worry that it 
> could turn into a space issue. However, if I prune the lists to 
> include only what I think is interesting, somebody is bound to 
> get upset (probably rightly so). On the other hand, if I just 
> randomly pick, some of the good stuff will inevitably get 
> passed over. I'm not sure how to handle this fairly. Thoughts?
>
> Last is Miscellania. for Adopt a Bug Report and Adopt a Bounty, 
> I'll choose a random bug report/bounty that people can tackle 
> (or not). The whole point is to try to mitigate the fact that a 
> lot of bug reports and/or bounties can go a long time without 
> any action, and get buried under new stuff coming in. I also 
> considered Adopt a Pull Request, to let people know about pull 
> requests sitting around without getting a review. I also 
> included Music for Hackers as a sort of fun little 
> afterthought. Thoughts?
>
> 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).
>
> 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.
>
> 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.
>
> The last thing is licensing, for completeness. Maybe I'm 
> overthinking this, but why not shore up a potential hole while 
> it still exists? I think either Boost or GPL would be 
> serviceable.
>
> 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.
>
> You can view the rought draft here.
>
> https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Elwm-k6Gs9f7Y-FQNmRVt1uycPEtLkHgpR4v2aQjGwc/edit?usp=sharing
>
> Again, please DO NOT submit this to Hackernews/Reddit, etc., as 
> it needs a lot more work before it's ready for public 
> consumption.
>
> DO destroy.

Just an idea, however how would you feel about doing it as a 
github repository and that way anybody can edit the next edition. 
The only issue I can think of is getting github markdown to be 
rendered in e.g. an email. Or at least converted to something 
clients can understand.
At worse the issue tracker would be a great way to allow others 
to tell you about content ext.


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