Re: [sage-release] Volunteer for changelog?

[Harald Schilly]

On Tue, Dec 17, 2013 at 8:29 PM, Vincent Knight <knig...@cf.ac.uk> wrote:
> Emphasising that I really don't know what the job is so I'd need a patient
> soul to hold my hand the first time around. As a result I obviously
> understand if someone else would be best.


Hi, they are basically adopting an old script to read in trac and git
data and output a "traditional" text file. I guess they'll write this
faster than we are mailing around here.

Said that, there is actually a gaping lack where you can help if you
are motivated enough: This release log lists all changes in a rather
boring way. Some of these changes are actually really cool new
features, but they get buried down in that list. What would be helpful
is a blog post, where important new features are presented
(description, copy/paste of some example code, screenshot, plot, ...
).

This blogpost is then tagged best with a label "sage" and these "sage"
posts will then be automatically included here:
http://planet.sagemath.org/
(essentially, the atom/rss feed for only this "sage" tag is copied
into this page)

I've cross-posted this mail to the sage-marketing list, since it is
actually about dissemination.

... and now i've gone through the list and stumbled about these uncut diamonds:

http://trac.sagemath.org/ticket/15150 <- combinatorics, i think
http://trac.sagemath.org/ticket/15433 <- OSX 10.9 port (important)
http://trac.sagemath.org/ticket/9411 <- elliptic curves
http://trac.sagemath.org/ticket/10132 <- geometry, huge patch
http://trac.sagemath.org/ticket/15392 <- maybe also interesting?
http://trac.sagemath.org/ticket/12083 <- cool TikZ plots !
http://trac.sagemath.org/ticket/15311 <- Hall Algebra?
http://trac.sagemath.org/ticket/14998 <- group theory
http://trac.sagemath.org/ticket/15322 <- combinatorics, some addiitonal stuff
http://trac.sagemath.org/ticket/10358 <- OEIS fixed

Of course, I'm sure you do not know much about all this. Neither do I.
Still, I think it's possible to write something up by going through
the doctests. I can also offer to help if we share this somehow.

Harald

[Niles Johnson]

I'd like to do some of this too, although I'm not very clear on how it
would be organized -- would I look at the list of tickets, pick some,
and send a sketch or draft announcement to sage-marketing? Could
people who've been working on closing a big ticket send us an
announcement? Would we organize a schedule for posting the feature
announcements? (Maybe one or two every couple of days after the
release?)

Whatever the answers are, it seems useful to look at a trac query for
the tickets merged in a particular release but organized by component:

http://trac.sagemath.org/query?status=closed&milestone=sage-5.13&group=component&col=id&col=summary&col=milestone&col=status&col=priority&col=author&order=priority

Then I could skip to the components that I know more about our am more
interested in, and click over to read the tickets. The list for 6.0
doesn't have so much in it, presumably because that release is just
about switching to git, but in general the list of closed tickets
merged in an upcoming release should be the right list, shouldn't it?

-Niles

[Harald Schilly]

On Wed, Dec 18, 2013 at 3:27 PM, Niles Johnson <nil...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I'd like to do some of this too, although I'm not very clear on how it
> would be organized

good question.

in the spirit of "dogfeeding" us our own stuff, we could start to
collaborate at cloud.sagemath.org. everyone who wants to do this, drop
me an email.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dogfooding

> Could
> people who've been working on closing a big ticket send us an
> announcement?

That would be really good, also for things that have been added in the
last several releases, because it is probably still noteworthy!

> Would we organize a schedule for posting the feature
> announcements? (Maybe one or two every couple of days after the
> release?)

I would rather see how it turns out and we can then agree piece by
piece when it is ready to be sent out.

>
> Whatever the answers are, it seems useful to look at a trac query for
> the tickets merged in a particular release but organized by component:
>
> http://trac.sagemath.org/query?status=closed&milestone=sage-5.13&group=component&col=id&col=summary&col=milestone&col=status&col=priority&col=author&order=priority

Yes, such a list is certainly helpful!

Harald

[Harald Schilly]

On Thu, Dec 19, 2013 at 11:38 AM, Nicolas M. Thiery
<Nicolas...@u-psud.fr> wrote:
> With that, we can
> just stick to our usual tools to write collaboratively the
> announcement for the important tickets.

Do you think this as a marker flag or something more elaborate?
Because, well, to make this nice, I assume one has to pick a few
tickets and write one larger piece for all of them, including some
additional context, etc. I don't think that works well from within a
single ticket.

Adding a marker would be very helpful, though. E.g. in the keyword
field, just adding something like "blog" or "announce" would be
enough.

Harald