Re: Monthy emacs-devel digest, similar to "This month in Org"

[Philip Kaludercic <philipk@posteo.net>]

Ihor Radchenko <yantar92@posteo.net> writes:

> Philip Kaludercic <philipk@posteo.net> writes:
>
>> There comes a point where people have to accept that mailing lists
>> What I think the Org project does well is the "This month in Org" line
>> of posts, that help highlight contributions from newcomers and
>> familiarise those familiar with a mailing list with the procedures going
>> on here.
>
> This is actually quite an effort. AFAIK, the author had difficulties
> allocating time to write more posts for TMiO.
>
> Also, for reference, we are talking about
> https://blog.tecosaur.com/tmio/2022-05-31-folding.html

TMiO might be too detailed and reliant on a single person, which might
be part of the problem in keeping it rolling.  I cannot evaluate that,
because I didn't follow the project in too much detail.

My initial plan (see https://amodernist.com/texts/elpa-zine.html) was
just to focus on ELPA-related development, such as new packages or
updates, since this is what most users are probably also interested in.
An idea that was discussed, and that might be emphasises in greater
detail could be to have a sort of "builtin-board" for announcements of
more important news or help requests from core ELPA development.

I think it is obvious, that this kind of a thing would have to be a
collaborative effort.  While it only requires a single or just a few
people to compile this kind of a post/newsletter, 

>> ... I have mentioned the idea of a ELPA
>> newsletter somewhere around here once, but upon reflection, it seems
>> like a TMIO-like idea should be implemented to the entire
>> core-development, not just the ELPAs.  Would anyone here be interested
>> in working on something like that?
>
> A somewhat relevant effort is by Sacha Chua:
> https://sachachua.com/blog/2023/08/2023-08-28-emacs-news/
>
> It is less detailed (just an outline), but I find it pretty useful.

Crucially it is incomplete, when it comes to core development.  There
are frequently longer discussions and bugs that never get mentioned on
the newsletter, even though they *should* be highlighted *and* explained
for an average user, especially if their feedback is what is needed.

On the other hand, the newsletter is as complete as it gets wrt all the
other news (I am under the impression that it summarises every
blog-post, reddit-submission, video, etc. published on the topic of
Emacs over the last week), which is not what I am interested in.

Timothy <orgmode@tec.tecosaur.net> writes:

> Hi Ihor,
>
>> This is actually quite an effort. AFAIK, the author had difficulties
>> allocating time to write more posts for TMiO.
>>
>> Also, for reference, we are talking about
>> <https://blog.tecosaur.com/tmio/2022-05-31-folding.html>
>
> Each post took several hours to do, despite how short they were. The major
> difficulty is in making sure that I’ve read as much as I can in that month, and
> trying to feel like I’ve treated most contributions “fairly” (i.e. not missing
> people out) which requires looking at the ML + git log since the last TMiO.
>
> For what it’s worth, once the org-latex-preview branch gets merged, I plan on
> doing another TMiO with the disclaimer that I may have missed out a bunch of
> things in that edition.
>
> Something else we could do is have some sort of “community draft” as is now
> being done on the Julia discourse, which could help reduce the individual
> workload (ref: <https://discourse.julialang.org/t/this-month-in-julia-world-2023-08/103242>).

I am not sure what this means, does one person create a summary of what
has been going on and others comment on it before it is published on a
proper blog?

> All the best,
> Timothy

John Yates <john@yates-sheets.org> writes:

> Writing new content (à la Linux Weekly News) is a massive effort.  I would
> expect any attempt at such a product to peter out in short order.
>
> A big, big +1 for Sacha's weekly Emacs News.  I find it just the right
> level of detail.  It directs one to Emacs mail threads, upcoming events and
> get togethers, blogs and Reddit posts, Youtube videos, etc.  And, IIRC, she
> is even set up to accept contributions from others.  Let's support her.

I am not proposing an alternative toe Emacs News in any sense.  What I
am trying to convince people in joining me bootstrap is a medium that is
published less frequently, goes into more detail on core-development and
ELPA news and ideally wouldn't be written by a single person, but
feature more guest posts.

> /john