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

[Fu Yuan]

>> 
>>> 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, 

That would be valuable for Emacs development. For example, sometimes I wish 
there is an official channel in which I can post progress of tree-sitter 
functionalities, and ask for help for adding certain features, and conclusion 
of general tree-sitter discussions and direction forward. I think other 
features/submodules could benefit the same.


>>> ... 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
>