On Thursday, 3 April 2014 at 16:34:28 UTC, Vladimir Panteleev wrote:
> On Tuesday, 1 April 2014 at 23:25:07 UTC, Meta wrote:
>> You can view the rought draft here.
>>
>> https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Elwm-k6Gs9f7Y-FQNmRVt1uycPEtLkHgpR4v2aQjGwc/edit?usp=sharing
>
> Could you please use canonical links to forum posts?
>
> http://forum.dlang.org/help#canonical
>
> If linking to the first post in a thread, replacing /thread/ with /post/ is enough.

Will do.

On Thursday, 3 April 2014 at 16:07:06 UTC, Meta wrote:
>
> The links, especially the Github ones, tend to be quite long, and I didn't want to take up too much space with them, especially with the "one link per line" format.
>
To clarify, I'm not against descriptive text serving as a link; my concern was only regarding the link formatting causing breaks in sentence flow.  I just used markdown-style notation for convenience in my example.

>> Suggest bulleted list, maybe below the important NG threads.  But what qualifies as a smaller announcement?
>
> That's what I'm trying to figure out. I may just use my own judgement to figure out what's important, although I am open to suggestions.
>
Point releases for libs/tools/applications might be good.  Meant to mention that before, but forgot.

> That's true, it'll always be in the changelog. Already, though, Dicebot has suggested that the -vgc pull should be featured more prominently. I agree, and I am somewhat worried about making a "wrong" choice for what to feature.
>
A rule of thumb might be to point out things that could potentially change someone's workflow, either by adding new tools or by changing/tightening the semantics of a feature.

> Also, what is GMN?
>
Gentoo Weekl^w Monthly Newsletter.

> Thanks for the links. The word "newsletter" is probably a misnomer, as that makes this sound more professional than it is. This is really just an attempt to aggregate the important news together in one place, the same as TWiR.
>
Huh, I've never thought of it that way.  Silly languages and their vagueness.  But that is pretty much what all the (successful) distro newsletters are like, so we agree in spirit! ;)

Cheers,
Wyatt

On Wednesday, 2 April 2014 at 00:50:56 UTC, Meta wrote:
> On Wednesday, 2 April 2014 at 00:25:08 UTC, Mike wrote:
>> I think the email will work well, but it might also be nice to have a public document that contributors could edit directly.  It might save you some cutting/pasting/word-smithing time.  Maybe then all you would need to do is perform a final edit.  Wiki or Github, mabye? (or maybe not)
>
> I entertained the idea of hosting it on GitHub. This would make "moderation" of submissions in the form of pull requests fairly simple. The drawback of this, however, is that anyone can see each issue long before it is finished, diminishing the "impact" of the actual release. Maybe this isn't a huge problem, though.
>
>> Having to do the same thing every week can get old, too.  Again, I think some way for the general D public to contribute directly would help with this, but I know that has the potential to become a management nightmare in itself.
>
> With a few other volunteers, we could take turns round-robin style. It depends on who else wants to volunteer their time, I guess. The more I think about having a community-contributed list on Github, the more I like it, but that seems to conflict with why I'm doing this in the first place, i.e., nobody else wants to do it.

Nice draft, looks good. I'll agree with others that you should crowdsource as much as possible.  Even if very few people ever contribute, it helps that the option is there and I imagine some will use it.  I think people being able to access the in-progress newsletter before release is a feature not a bug, for those who must know what's going on as it happens.  Most will probably just access it upon release.  I'm not a fan of using github for everything though, maybe the existing wiki would be a more lightweight way to collaborate?

I just ran across LLVM Weekly, a newsletter for the LLVM project started earlier this year, might be worth looking at.  They recently mentioned Warp, and the fact that clang still beats it, ;) in their latest newsletter:

http://blog.llvm.org/2014/03/llvm-weekly-13-mar-31st-2014.html

Thanks, this looks really promising.

On Thursday, 3 April 2014 at 16:07:06 UTC, Meta wrote:
> On Wednesday, 2 April 2014 at 14:31:49 UTC, Wyatt wrote:
>> This is a good base.  In general, I would suggest not shying away from subheadings.  It gives you more opportunities to catch the eye and tends to allow readers to see the parts that interest them more easily.  Conversely, making phrases links tends to make reading harder; would it be acceptable to just put the link after?  See below.
>
> The links, especially the Github ones, tend to be quite long, and I didn't want to take up too much space with them, especially with the "one link per line" format. I think this might be okay for the one-line announcements and pull-requests, as I think people generally care more about what's at the actual link itself (e.g., a pull request on Github or an announcement post in the newsgroup) than one line in a list. I'll experiment with one descriptive line plus a link just below and see how it looks.
>
>
>> For articles, I'd also recommend a sentence or three describing what the article actually covers.  To clarify, I'm thinking something like this:
>>
>> # Articles #
>>
>> ## Improving Performance With Static Polymorphism ##
>>
>> Atíla Neves talks about how he retooled his serialiser library to eliminate allocations and dramatically improve performance.
>>  He explains the underlying idea in detail, then shows benchmarks covering the possible improvements he mentioned.
>>
>> * [Atíla's Blog]($url)
>>
>> ## Functional image processing in D ##
>>
>> Vladimir Panteleev has written a "highlights reel" post to demonstrate his overhauled graphics library with an emphasis on composition, laziness, and templating.
>>
>> * [Vladimir's Blog]($url)
>>
>>> followed by a couple of the big announcements, which each get a whole paragraph to themselves
>>
>> Broken up with subs, this is good.
>
> Yes, I think this is much better. Thanks for the suggestion.
>
>
>> Suggest bulleted list, maybe below the important NG threads.  But what qualifies as a smaller announcement?
>
> That's what I'm trying to figure out. I may just use my own judgement to figure out what's important, although I am open to suggestions.
>
>
>> From my perspective, most PRs are probably not all that interesting. If they are, they'll get documented in the changelog.  If there's a big hurly-burly about it on the NG, then maybe it's worth more coverage under a "Notable Pulls" heading, but it might not be so important on the whole.  After all, it won't affect most people until it makes it into a release anyway.
>
> That's true, it'll always be in the changelog. Already, though, Dicebot has suggested that the -vgc pull should be featured more prominently. I agree, and I am somewhat worried about making a "wrong" choice for what to feature.
>
>
>> Thinking back, one common thing is to point major news coverage, so a "D in the Press" might not be a bad idea when there's something to put there.  Developer interviews come up semi-regularly (and are pretty light on their editorial needs, usually), so it might be worth trying.  I recall seeing some job posting sections in the past, too.
>
> Good idea. However, right now this info is sporadic enough that I can just include/not include a section featuring it when it comes up, or put it in the announcements.
>
>
>> I'll second the request for Bugzilla stats; they're a frequent feature and it can help remind people to do filing, triage, and the like.  I'm told this is what we use to aggregate those for GMN; maybe you can make it work for your case? http://sources.gentoo.org/cgi-bin/viewvc.cgi/gentoo/src/gwn/
>
> I'll take a look. Also, what is GMN?
>
>
>> It doesn't seem common for language communities to have an "official" newsletter (that I've seen), but here's a few samples of how they've been formatted/managed in the past at the distro level; they may be helpful inspiration:
>> https://blogs.gentoo.org/news/2014/01/31/gentoo-monthly-newsletter-january-2014/
>> http://www.gentoo.org/news/en/gwn/20071015-newsletter.xml (old, weekly format)
>> https://www.archlinux.org/static/magazine/2010/ALM-2010-Jan.html
>> https://www.archlinux.org/static/magazine/2004/newsletter-2004-Dec-19.html (old format)
>> https://www.debian.org/News/weekly/current/issue/
>> https://en.opensuse.org/Archive:Weekly_news_134
>
> Thanks for the links. The word "newsletter" is probably a misnomer, as that makes this sound more professional than it is. This is really just an attempt to aggregate the important news together in one place, the same as TWiR.

Here's another example:
KDE Commit-Digest, a weekly overview of the development activity in KDE. http://commit-digest.org/

Only there haven't been new issues for a while...