Hi Bernd,

On 10/13/09 18:07, Bernd Eilers wrote:

Hi there!

Just a quick reminder to specification writers:

Specification documents are parsed for creating "WhatsNew" information included into ReleaseNotes HTML pages where some content from the specifications is being extracted for the ReleaseNotes of OOo-DeveloperSnapshots and OOo-Releases.

Please make sure that your specification is suitable for this process.

Start by using official templates for specification documents or specification wiki page.

Further make sure to have a first paragraph in the abstract section of your specification that would be suitable as the text for the WhatsNew Information of ReleaseNotes. Especially do not start your abstract with text like "This specification is about" or similar text which would not be suitable for being included into the WhatsNew Information of the ReleaseNotes for a OOo-Release or OOo-DeveloperSnapShot.


I have changed several specifications now and I think this process is suboptimal. The abstract has to serve two different purposes that not always fit together. One purpose is the overview about the specification. The other purpose is the WhatsNew-Info. For a new feature with an own new specification this might be quite ok, but several specifications do evolve as features are added. So they might describe more than one feature. Furthermore some features are spread over more than one specification. Checking the specifications with the mentioned checking process did take me some additional time and even though I have used the template there were several errors. There are still errors left and I have no idea how to fix them. The parsing seems to be very error prone (maybe this is caused by the problems you mention below).
But the worst at this process is that it is so easy to forget about.

Couldn't we instead introduce an extra section within the Feature Mail?

This would be so simple, self describing, self reminding, easy to use and easy to parse.

Thanks for the reminder for the current process!
Ingrid

You can than also check if your document or wiki page can still be parsed correctly for this process or wether on the contrary you might have corrupted the template with changes being incompatible to the parsing by using the Misc/CheckSpecification Menu Entry in EIS.

Further make sure to have a correct link to the specification included when posting feature mails for your new features from within EIS.

This reminder is being posted because the process is currently somewhat broken, manual reediting is being needed and some valuable information might be misssing in ReleaseNotes because of incompatible specification documents.

Kind regards,
Bernd Eilers

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