Re: RFC - Git Developer Blog

From: Christian Couder <christian.couder@gmail.com>
Date: Aug 6, 2019, 04:59 UTC
Message-ID: <CAP8UFD1XNGWf8=_LvrEsFswZdw5pydk2VyVWxWvwALfhVbBOsg@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <xmqqlfw7klwk.fsf@gitster-ct.c.googlers.com>

On Tue, Aug 6, 2019 at 5:35 AM Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com> wrote:

Show 20 quoted lines

>
> Emily Shaffer <emilyshaffer@google.com> writes:
>
> > In backchannels recently there has been some discussion about the idea
> > of a Git-project-blessed blog written by Git contributors, generally
> > covering usability tips or overviews of the internals of Git which the
> > general public tend to find confusing.
> > ...
> > The idea is that we could cover high level topics stringing together
> > multiple components or giving power user advice, which we can't really
> > do with the manpages.
> >
> > Thoughts?
>
> Interesting.
>
> I recall that I used to do the "Fun with ..." series back when I was
> more into use-case-exploration mode; writing those articles was fun,
> but it took a lot of time and quite an effort, so I stopped after
> writing enough.

Linux-Kongress (LK) was a conference organized by the German Unix User Group from 1994 to 2010. They asked authors of accepted submissions for the technical sessions to provide a paper for publication in the conference proceedings. As I wanted to give a presentation at LK 2009, I wrote a paper about git bisect and asked kind souls (like Junio) to review it on the mailing list. A bit later it was included in the Git documentation and is still there:

https://git-scm.com/docs/git-bisect-lk2009.html

The git bisect man page links to it, but I must say that it tends to be a bit obsolete as it has not really been updated.

There are also "guides" that are part of the actual documentation and can be listed using `git help -g`.

> Making it a group effort may help by allowing writers and reviewers
> to encourage each other.

When Git Rev News was started I thought that there could be such a group effort to encourage each other to publish articles in it, but I must say that outside the group of editors (currently Jakub, Markus, Gabriel and me) it hasn't happened much.

Each month though there are a small number of people helping on smaller things like short news, typos, releases, etc. And people who are interviewed are doing a great job when they accept to be interviewed.

Maybe it's also not clear that we could accept other kind of articles than just articles focused on what happens on the mailing list. I think we have generally tried to highlight articles by Git developers that were published on their blogs or their company's blog though.

In any case if you or others would like to join the editor group to focus on other kind of articles, or just to help a bit, you are most welcome!

I would also be ok to change the form of Git Rev News if there is an official blog. For example the "Discussions" section could become something like "Featured articles" with links to articles on the blog.