Re: NEWS entries for packages?

Darryl> Hrvoje Niksic <hniksic(a)xemacs.org&gt; wrote: What do you find enticing about them? That's a real question. I find them distressing, since the subtext is "we hope you like it, because you're going to have to wait another three years for the next version." (That's an extreme, not an exaggeration. An important extreme at that: the last update of Gnus took over 3 years, and GNU's current MH-E is well over 2 years old, with no update in sight, and tons of effort focused on _RMAIL_! Will rms get real quoting? Will Handa and gniibe get RFC 2046 charset parameters? Film at 11!) I think it's a feature that core NEWS says nothing about packages: Packages: No Package NEWS. With XEmacs, Lisp packages are always up-to-date. To find out what's available, configure your mirrors, and then do "M-x list-packages". :-) Humor, yes, but we need to find a way to tell users about package updates that also emphasizes that they happen in real time. NEWS is not very good from that perspective, IMO. No NEWS is actually read by end users until after they install AFAICT. Darryl> While NEWS entries would be good, perhaps a second Darryl> choice would be freshmeat announcements? Well, AFAIK Norbert's announcements (of public releases, not the pre-releases) go out on xemacs-announce, which has about 800 subscribers. (Not to make work for Norbert, but) We could post those announcements on the web site. Since they're so frequent (at least bi-monthly) we'd have to work out some scheme where several would be available directly from the front page, I guess. Or maybe for the most recent quarter and fraction, have links Since September 1, 2003, calc, games, cc-mode, <!-- about three lines :) --> were <a href="Releases/index.html#package_news_2003q4">updated or added</a>. Since July 1, 2003, edict, mh-e, cc-mode, <!-- about five lines :) --> were <a href="Releases/index.html#package_news_2003q3">updated or added</a>. On the other hand, if you're talking about major new features, etc, shouldn't that be done by, or at least coordinated with, the upstream maintainers? As for freshmeat, I perfectly understand why Darryl is not volunteering. I wouldn't either---I did some freshmeat work early in the 21.4 series, and I have to say it was a massive PITA because you had to do it via web, the freshmeat system was flatlined[1], and on top of that somebody not directly associated with the core set up a freshmeat account for XEmacs and then disappeared. (I think Adrian resolved that last issue, but I haven't noticed any great enthusiasm for freshmeat stuff.) Does anybody have a script that auto-updates freshmeat entries? Footnotes: [1] No detectable electrical activity in the EEG. -- Institute of Policy and Planning Sciences http://turnbull.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp University of Tsukuba Tennodai 1-1-1 Tsukuba 305-8573 JAPAN Ask not how you can "do" free software business; ask what your business can "do for" free software.